by Dan Swanson
To the Ghast, the Ghostly Avenger, spirits weren’t invisible at all but appeared before her mystical senses as clear as day. She had questions for both the ghost and the angel before her.
“Who are you two?” The deep bass of the Ghast’s voice, which Bensonhurst could sense was magically enhanced, shook the entire penthouse apartment. “You’re a mystical being,” she said, unable to quite bring herself to use the term angel. She turned to Spooks. “And you’re a ghost inhabiting a human body.” She was quite intrigued. After all, in her fictional history she was a ghost inhabiting a human body (her own), and in this reality, she was a magical spell inhabiting a human body.
Meanwhile, Velvet, who had passed out at about the time the Ghast had leaped at her, moaned in unconscious pain. The Ghast turned to her, slashed her free of her ropes with razor-sharp fingernails, and gently laid her on the rug.
“You must be one of those super-heroes!” Spooks said enthusiastically. “I’ve been hoping to run into some of you fellows, but you’re my first!”
“Hardly!” she laughed, and now her voice was normal. “I’m on the other side!”
Yet, am I really? she wondered privately. I warned the girl to leave town, I didn’t kill anyone yet, and then I saved the girl’s life. The Ghast would have killed them all, just to prove she was serious — and unbeatable. It was a disturbing thought. The world I came from had been devastated during the war, in large part due to the JLA, she began her thought, then corrected it. In a large part due to Adamant, the Abhorrent Android! Must I continue to be a villain because I was written into a work of fiction as a villain? I can think for myself now — I am not constrained by anything in my past, because I have no past.
Spooks looked questioningly at Bensonhurst, who shrugged. “I don’t see anything that suggests she’s ready for the place we sent Ripper.”
“Are you sure?” the angel asked her. “My mission on Earth is to promote good and fight evil. Let’s talk!”
***
In his throne room, Satanus roared in anger as his sister laughed. They could both sense potential outcomes of that talk, and many of them were unpleasant — for a demon, at least.
“My agent will never join the side of good!” he thundered, and snapped his fingers. The scene on Earth vanished, and the pane switched to another scene, where another of Satanus’ chosen agents was forwarding the cause of evil. He pushed the Ghast from his mind. He knew Blaze would taunt him with this failure, but after all, this was only one of his millions of plans.
***
“We have much in common,” Spooks summed up. “Both your fictional self and real self. We both only have physical selves when we inhabit the bodies of others.”
“But in your case,” the Ghast pointed out heatedly, “you continue to exist between bodies, while my existence seems to vanish.”
“As does the existence of your host while you possess her body,” Bensonhurst pointed out. He’d used angelic mystical senses to verify that yes, indeed, that woman still existed, and she was unaware of anything since she had donned the cowl. “Would you continue your existence at the cost of another? You spared many lives last night, and probably saved this one.” He pointed at Velvet.
The Ghast was slow to answer. She had been considering this very question. “Those lives had no bearing on my future existence. I would continue whether they lived or died.”
Spooks metaphorically leaped. “So if there was a way to relinquish your current host body but continue your own existence, you would do it?”
“I would at least consider it,” she said, nodding in partial agreement. “Tell me of this way.”
“This body I wear is empty of a soul,” Spooks replied. “It’s in pretty good shape; my magic protected it from further damage from Aunt Minerva’s shots. Your healing magic would take care of the earlier damage.” He saw that she was about to object, so he continued quickly. “You have the ability to animate a dead body. The monks who killed you gave you this ability, and bound you to your own dead body. You’ve verified that you indeed possess every game power attributed to you.”
“You said the body you are in lacked a soul,” she countered. “Will the magical spell that is me be able to substitute for a soul? Remember, this is real life, not a game. I am not a soul… am I?”
Both ghost and Ghast turned their gaze on Bensonhurst. “Well, Bensonhurst? You’re our expert on souls!” Spooks reminded his partner.
“There’s nothing in the rules about this!” the cherub pleaded.
“Listen, Bensonhurst, you know I am allowed to return to Earth to perform good deeds. We have a chance to perform some very good deeds here — saving a life, and while saving one life, give life to another. How much better can a good deed get?”
“But what if I get in trouble?”
“Hey, you work for an angel. How much trouble could you possibly get into?”
Bensonhurst wanted to be persuaded, so he was. He examined the Ghast more closely with his mystical senses. “Whoever cast your spell knew a lot about souls,” he reassured the Ghast. “I don’t think you are truly a full soul yet, but I believe that you could grow into one. You are certainly capable of animating a human body.”
That wasn’t a surprise; she’d been designed to do just that.
“How will we do this?” she asked hesitantly. “Not that I’ve agreed to do it yet, but what’s going to happen? You can get her back–” She referred to Val Coppersmith. “–by removing the cowl, and you can get me back by putting the cowl on Ripper, but what is going to happen to you?”
“I’ll release the body just before closing the clasp, and Bensonhurst will finish the job.” Bensonhurst didn’t look happy, but he nodded assent.
“And…” she hesitated before asking the really big question. “How do I know I can trust you to put the cowl on? I’ll be nonexistent.”
“If he makes a promise to you about this, and he breaks it, they will be very unhappy with him upstairs,” Bensonhurst offered. “You can trust him.”
The Ghast hadn’t become the leader of a vast criminal empire by hesitating over tough decisions. “Do it!” She insisted in a hiss. “Quickly!”
Spooks reached out. Ripper’s strong fingers pried open the clasp she had jimmied shut earlier, and he lifted the cowl.
As the ghost did so, Bensonhurst felt a pulse of evil magic. “Oh, pooters!” he cried out in anger as he pitted his entire cherubic might trying to disrupt or counteract that evil. He felt like a pebble trying to resist an avalanche as it washed through the room. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought that maybe he’d managed to deflect it just the tiniest bit. And then he saw that he’d failed.
As the cowl was lifted from Val’s head, the cape and cowl turned to dust. An evil laugh filled the room, drowning out the slight noise the clasp made as it fell onto the thick carpet, totally unnoticed by anyone.
“Dang it all to heck!” Bensonhurst swore as vehemently as a cherub was allowed. “I tried, Spooks, but it was a demon, and I’m only a cherub — and still provisional, at that…”
Before Spooks could reply, they had a very confused Valerie Coppersmith to deal with.
***
Valerie Coppersmith had donned her blacks and grays, but as she pulled the cowl over her head, she felt a chill, which raised goosebumps and caused her to shiver. “Damned drafty house!” she snarled, as she shrugged into the cape and snapped the clasp shut.
Now the lighting and the setting changed instantly, and she felt neither the cowl nor the weight of its clasp. Standing much too close to her was a very large man, splattered with blood. Val reacted instantly, calling on reflexes and skills she didn’t even know she had, and put all her strength into a single blow, to the spot where it would do the most good, then spun to run away. She’d gone two steps before the rest of the scene completely registered, and she saw that she was no longer in her small house but somewhere else entirely.
Forcing her confusion away until after she’d dealt with the urgent current situation, Val risked a quick look behind her. The large man wasn’t writhing on the floor as she’d expected, but he wasn’t following her either. He didn’t have a weapon and wasn’t making any threatening movements, just standing there with his hands at his sides. She took another three steps, then turned around. He still hadn’t moved.
Val spun completely around and ended up facing the man. She was in some kind of office, very large, very expensively furnished, and very high up in a city, surrounded by other tall buildings. There were several men lying in a jumbled heap on the floor, with blood on their heads. There were two women lying on the floor, an old lady tightly bound and a much younger one apparently unconscious after enduring a heavy beating. And her magic sense was in high gear — there was the residue of a powerful magic spell in this room, and the large man had a very robust magical aura.
She was still wearing the outfit she’d had on just before she’d appeared here — a gray jumpsuit and black leather gloves and boots — but the cape and cowl were gone. And hanging from belt was her wishing bag.
“I want something to help me get out of here!” she screamed as she plunged her hand into the blue leather bag. Her hand immediately bumped into something, so she grabbed it and pulled it out. It was much smaller and lighter than anything she had expected.
She couldn’t believe it. She was holding a pair of spectacles. To her quick glance, they looked like the antique glasses the admiral had worn in the last Star Train movie. She was about to throw them to the ground and run when she realized that she knew that the spectacles had magical abilities, and she knew what some of those abilities were. Among all the other things she’d forgotten about her life as Majique, she’d forgotten that she immediately gained an understanding of whatever she pulled from the bag and how it could help her. She had also forgotten, and didn’t quite recall yet, that many of the objects she had pulled out had other powers as well, and those other powers had often caused mischief, confusion, danger, and damage.
While wearing these spectacles, she would be invisible. She jammed them onto her face and then backed up until she encountered a wall.
“Say, that’s a neat trick!”
The large man could apparently still see her. Since he hadn’t moved, and all the bodies on the floor seemed to be unconscious, she relaxed just a little and asked some of the questions that were forcing their way into her mind.
“Who are you? Where are we? What the hell is going on?”
He winced at her language, though the words she interspersed throughout her questions couldn’t be repeated here. An expert observer would have noted that she never repeated a curse.
“My name is Professor Oscar Willard, but most everyone calls me Spooks. At one time I was a professor of anatomy. Now I’m a ghost, a friendly ghost.”
She interrupted him. “Just like Casper, huh? You don’t look like a ghost!” Val had never met a ghost before, but she had met other supernatural beings, so she didn’t automatically disbelieve him.
“You can’t see my real form right now, because I’m inhabiting this body. But let’s keep this moving. The old lady is Aunt Minerva, the most powerful criminal leader in New York City, and we’re in her office in the penthouse of the Binder Building. Those guys on the floor work for her, and the young lady used to work for her, too, but tried to quit — and was punished for it.” It wasn’t quite the whole story, but it would do for now. “Another of her employees died tonight, and for the time being, I’m using his body.”
She interrupted him again. “So how did I get here? Three minutes ago, I was in my bedroom in Rowaton, Connecticut.”
“Uh…” he stuttered a little in his reply. “That was closer to three days ago, and probably more. You see, you were possessed by a magical spirit with strange mystical powers, who just… er… died?”
Val shook her head in disbelief — and was amazed to realize that her neck and shoulders were pain-free. She had been plagued with awful arthritis for the last five years, and had forgotten what it was like to be pain-free. She was also surprised to realize that she was actually inclined to believe everything he was telling her. It was almost like she had known all along, but had forgotten, and he was just reminding her.
Spooks spoke again. “I don’t wish to seem to be rushing you,” he began politely, “but we are in the stronghold of a powerful villain, surrounded by her minions. And while it seems like you are perfectly able to slip out undetected on your own, I would like to see that the villain and her minions end up in jail — and the young lady rescued as well. And my time in this body is almost up.”
Val was thinking fast, and suddenly a thought came to her like a lightbulb being turned on. “1-800-JUSTICE!” she yelled excitedly. Spooks looked very confused. “It’s a phone number. The phone number of the Squadron of Justice!”