Chapter 1: Ghost of a Chance    (print this)

HE IS FALLING down a shaft of light as bright as the hundred million suns of his potential, candlepower to the Nth, falling at last to the great black pyramid of the Underworld, to dwell forever as a Voice, a vibrating shadow unseen by any but the lonelyhearted and deranged, el hombre invisible at long last. He is pure light at last, pure in the sense that he was about to be extinguished forever and reborn as light’s blissed and unholy opposite, oblivion, darkness. Only the Voice to remain, only words burning in the void beneath the world…

Henry Bethel came awake. This time the dream was not shattered by the shrill ring of the ancient phone he never answered, nor by the knocks and insistent pressure on a doorbell whose wires had been cut, nor by the insistent morning pressure of his bladder—life’s only constant—forcing him out of his gray sheets and into the dull white bathroom down the hall, shuffling like a mental patient in search of the TV room. No, this time the dream was cut short by sudden below-zero chill that had come over the room, raising the hairs on his arms and washing over him like an occult hand. In fact, it was an occult hand that had pulled Henry Bethel painfully back into the conscious world he could little bear anymore.

It was the ghost of Jack Samson.

“Hello, Jack,” said Henry thickly. You had to initiate conversation with Jack because otherwise Jack would just hang there like the sick visceral memory of a bad bout of the stomach flu and, bereft of Jacob Marley-style chains, stare at you for what seemed like hours. But if you spoke to Jack he could speak back (and why this was, why Jack Samson, who never waited for anyone to speak before dominating them with his ink-sharpened tongue in his former life, had to wait for this permission was beyond Henry, who imagined it was either a karmic punishment or some obscure ectoplasmic rule that he had never stumbled upon during his long hours nodding over texts at Miskatonic U.), and speaking to Jack was the surest way of getting rid of him (something else that was utterly the opposite of Jack’s earthly existence).

“Time, time, time, see what’s become of you,” said Jack, whose voice sounded as if it was being run through a wah-wah pedal off in some distant room. “Hank, baby, what are you doing in bed at one in the p.m.?”

Henry opened his eyes fully and saw Jack hovering off to the left, wearing his black leather blazer as always, his porkpie askew on his shaved head, his eyes forever gone behind granny shades. It was how he always appeared. Henry once nearly asked if Jack, in his spectral state, could in fact take his sunglasses off, and then thought better of seeing what the actual eyes of a ghost might look like.

“Jesus, Hanky. You look like hell. You look worse than I do, and I’m dead. What’s with you?”

“Oh, you know,” said Henry quietly. “Just watching life’s rich pageant.” He had yet to move since waking, and he thought dimly that after Jack faded to white in a few minutes, so then could he.

Jack, in that irritating, otherworldly way he had now (and, come to think of it, had in life) sensed this. “Wow. You have a black dog the size of a VW sitting on you chest.”

Henry smiled. “Yes. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t get up.”

“Someone has done a number on you, Hanky. What was her name? Why aren’t you banging away at the typewriter in melodramatic exorcism?”

“I don’t write anymore, Jack,” said Henry.

Jack Samson snorted and lit a ghostly cigarette… or at least, went through the motions, there being no cigarette and no lighter in his hands as they wen through their dumb show of memory. “What a crock. This is not the Henry Bethel I know, prodigious thinker of Big Thoughts, aesthetic gadfly, devastating cultural critic-at-large. What’s happened, professore?”

“I’m not a professor anymore, Jack,” said Henry.

“Stop kidding around, boyo.” And Jack’s form and face wavered and stiffened as he realized Henry was not kidding. “What’s going on?”

“For a ghost, you’re woefully uninformed, Jack.” Henry realized he was not going to go back to sleep, and with a rueful creaking of muscle and bone, sat up. “I don’t do the art critic bit anymore. I gave it up after SOL folded. And I gave up the chair at the university.”

Jack floated and let out a long, sepulchral whistle. “Sorry, baby. I’ve been limboing, you know? What the hell happened?”

“Nothing happened, everything happened,” said Henry wearily.

“C’mon, Hanky, spill it. I walk into the disintegration of Mighty Henry Bethel, you gotta tell me about it.”

Fuck it, he thought. He wasn’t going to go over it all again with this fucking hallucination, not after going over it to the tune of $200 an hour with that other fucking hallucination known as therapy. Normally these visitations from Jack were pleasurably creepy, but this was too much like a superficial chitchat with some old asshole you once thought you were friends with. He hadn’t seen Jack for some time… maybe this was another step toward that blissful oblivion.

“It’s exhausting, Jack. Please let it go. I’m a different person these days. Re-invented myself like everyone else.”

“Jesus fuck,” said Jack, who drifted over to the spartan desk by the window whose blinds had been closed for so long it was uncertain if there was still a window behind them at all anymore. “Okay, baby, I won’t push it. I’m never in a hurry anymore,” he cackled, “and you’re still a stubborn ass. So what’s your brilliant new career if you’re not dispensing pearls of insight anymore?”

Henry rubbed his neck and go up, walking stiffly to the desk. He pulled open the drawer and took out a cream-colored business card and flung it toward the semi-translucent form of the person who was once his very best friend, if not his only true friend. The card read, in elegant Times Roman:

HENRY BETHEL Sinatraist Ivanhoe 4-5451

Embossed in the card’s center was the barely discernible image of a snap-brim hat with a very high band.

“Sinatraist?” barked Jack with that unsettling laugh the dead have. “What the fuck is that?”

Henry smiled. “I make my living buying and selling rare Sinatra recordings and memorabilia.”

“What? And his estate isn’t all over you?”

Henry yawned. “You forget The Favor.”

“Oh, right,” said Jack. The card slowly passed though his hand and fluttered to the floor. His face screwed up, and Henry prepared for the withering torrent of his dead friend’s scorn and wit.

But, weirdly, it was not forthcoming, not this time. A change came over Jack; his whole form shifting like smoke caught in a draft from an open door. “Well, that’s the damndest fucking thing, Hanky old boy. But I’ve got to go now.”

“Oh. Well, nice to see you Jack.” Now even Henry’s hallucinations were unstable and inconsistent. What did you expect, he sighed.

Jack was fading, the room temperature slowly rising back to normal. Suddenly he turned and mock-smacked his forehead. “Oh fuck! I nearly forgot why I was here!”

“Yeah,” said Henry, and suddenly, inexplicably, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up for real.

“The omen,” said Jack, smiling his old, wicked smile. “Heh. Or portent, whatever you want to call it.”

“Omen?” said Henry.

“Yeah. Apparently, you’re going to become Lord Hierophant of Las Vegas, Emperor of Stones.”

“Excuse me?”

“Hey, that’s how it was put to me.” Jack was fading fast, his voice beginning to resonate like a cell phone call inside an iron lung. “And something about your love will be your only shield, your shield your greatest sacrifice…”

Jack was almost smoke. “See you around, baby… oh, and there’s that pounding at the door tooooooooooo…”

It was like the hand of God letting the air out of your tires. Henry Bethel closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, and when he opened them Jack Samson was really and truly dead and there wasn’t a sound in the room, not even an echo real or imagined.

There was, however, a pounding at the door.