Irony in Triplicate

The irony was mind-boggling.

That was the only thought running through Marco 'Pool Cue' Sabino's head as the woman before him continued denying the obvious.

“This can't be happening! You're not real! Ghosts aren't real!”

“Oh, it's happening and I'm very much real. Well, at least in the intangible, ethereal spirit version of real,” Marco said, idly brushing back his gelled auburn hair.

Tabitha was laying upon the kitchen floor in the cliché fetal position and staring a thousand feet beyond the boning knife she had tried and failed to use against the full-torso, Class IV apparition standing next to her.

“Ghosts aren't real! You're not real! I'm just dreaming or high, maybe drunk or both, it's gotta be something! There's no such thing as ghosts!”

Marco could tell from experience that she wasn't going to calm down any time soon unless he gave her a shock that could break through her hysteria.

Giving a sigh unnoticed by Tabitha, the spirit phased through the floor and disappeared, only to reappear a second later, from the chin up, millimeters from her nose.

“Boo,” he said, not putting any effort into it.

Tabitha shrieked so terribly that the couple walking outside on the other side of Polhemus Place heard it as though she was right beside them, but acting as true New Yorkers do, they simply shrugged and continued on.

She scrambled to her feet and ran to her bedroom, locking the door behind her as if the intruder were dictated by the laws of physics. Tabitha slunk to the floor and began to sob, still in denial of the new state of reality that had been thrust upon her.

Marco was losing patience, of all the people in New York City, the only person to gain the Sight in over twenty-five years was the owner of a new-age spiritualist shop who held fake seances in the back.

The irony was mind-boggling.

He remembered a time not so long ago, in regards to eternity at least, when ghosts, poltergeists, and the undead in general were at the height of popularity and nearly everyone wanted them to be real. A wistful smile crossed his lips, the original Ghostbusters, such a classic. Tinseltown doesn't make them like that any more, too many explosions and not enough personality in the characters.

As Tabitha cried to herself in the other room, he thought it best he try a different approach and called for reinforcements. Drawing upon himself, he let out a subtle pulse of psychic energy, just enough to reach out to other spirits that might be in the neighborhood.

While he waited for a reply, Marco nonchalantly glided through the door, sat on the simple double wide bed and listened to what Tabitha muttered under her breath.

It was mostly more of the same, ghosts aren't real, must be dreaming or maybe the new herb bundles in the shop had some hallucinogenic properties. But it was her rationalizing that some Pinkberry from the corner would help her come to her senses and end this nightmare that actually made him angry.

Tabitha knew nothing of nightmares.

A nightmare is being taken into the Mafia at the age of eight and killing your first squealer with a pool cue at nine. Spending the thirty years of your life working for the Family as a hitman only to be strangled to death by your own brother after finding out he was working as a weasel for the Feds is a nightmare. Yet the absolute worst is coming back from the dead, face to face with your own corpse hanging on a butcher's hook with the other pieces of meat traveling down the line at the hotdog factory because your traitor brother framed you as the snitch. The only consolation was that Ma wasn't around to die of a broken heart from the shock of it all.

Coming out of his revelry, Marco glanced at the clock and realized that nearly ten minutes had passed since he entered the bedroom and put out the request for assistance.

“That can't be right,” he mused. “No response yet? Usually everyone is so desperate to talk to the living. Maybe they've started making their way to the New Year's party.”

Once again Marco put out a request for aide, doubling the strength this time, trying to catch any stragglers that might not have yet finished the trek twenty blocks south to Chinatown and its festivities.

Almost immediately he realized his mistake, his call had been too powerful, it had washed over the Brooklyn Museum.

“Dammit! Dammit! DAMMIT!”

Marco's sudden cursing stunned Tabitha, she looked up at him in surprise, mouth agape but finally silent. Her eyes red from crying until there was nothing left to give.

“Good, you've shut up,” Marco said, floating down through the floor to face her.

“Listen to me very carefully, we've only got a few minutes before it figures out where we are.”

“But you're not real...” Tabitha squeaked out.

Marco slapped her right across the cheek, not that it would do anything really, he just hoped the chill of a spectral hand going through her face would force her to keep quiet and realize that there was a more immediate threat to her existence than the question of life after death.

“I am very real. Just like the thing that I was dumb enough to wake up is very real and more dangerous than you can imagine,” he took her head in his hands, using the freezing affect of his ghostly form to keep her attention.

“I don't care that you've faked being a psychic to drum up business at your crystal healing, one with Mother Gaia, voodoo, Wiccan or whatever shop,” Tabitha opened her mouth to correct him but Marco continued on.

“Nor is it important about how you woke only half an hour ago to find me, a Mafia hitman who died in 1927, waiting in your bathroom so I could watch you take a shower. The only thing that matters right now is that we find something I can possess and we both get to the church on Carrol Street before it reaches us. Got it? Good.”

Marco finally released her from his icy grip and started frantically touching anything and everything in the room, trying to find something with enough residual resonance that he could latch onto and become a part of it.

Tabitha continued to sit against the door, merely watching him, not understanding what could cause a ghost to fear for his unlife.

“I've been banned from Old First Reformed,” she said quietly, “for blasphemous practices.”

“Doesn't matter, demand sanctuary and tell the priest to contact Ezekiel, he'll understand what that means.”

“What are you so afraid of?”

Marco suddenly came to a stop, his hand inside a shoe box under her bed, touching something so emotionally charged that it nearly overwhelmed him. It was a feeling he hadn't experienced for a very long time, so long in fact, he had nearly forgotten how much warmth it could give someone.

“What's in this box?” he asked ignoring her question.

“What are you so afraid of?” Tabitha asked again, slowly standing.

Marco began to let himself go, allowing his essence to be joined with whatever held so much love that it washed away everything else.

“I don't know what it is. All I know is that it is beyond ancient, from someplace called Assyria, always hungry and has the ability to consume anything that exists within the Spiritual Plane.”

Tabitha watched as Marco continued to fade into nothing. The tranquility reminded her of the last vestiges of a morning fog being burned away by the Sun, beautiful and melancholy all at once.

“Why should I be scared?”

“If you can see me, whatever that thing is can see you. If it can see you, then your soul will be like Ma's gnocchi pesto, too good to pass up, same as mine. What's in this box?” his voice was barely a whisper, he had fully joined the object within.

Tabitha pulled out the box, reverently raised the lid and undid the tissue paper, revealing ballerina shoes so tiny they didn't seem real.

“They're the shoes I bought for Katelyn, my daughter, the day I miscarried.”

Tabitha solemnly closed the container that held the only evidence of her greatest love and unlocked the bedroom door. As she walked out of her apartment and slowly made her way to the Gothic cathedral, her thoughts lingered elsewhere.

She ignored the chill as the New Moon rose to welcome the Year of the Tiger, she ignored the stares she got from other people for walking around in floral pajamas with no shoes and she ignored the ominous clouds in the east that seemed to be reaching out like tendrils trying to grab her.

The only thing on her mind was that of all the things in her brownstone, Marco, the ghost of a 1920s Mafia hitman, somebody who made a living taking the lives of others, connected most with the shoes of a sweet little baby girl that never was.

The irony was mind-boggling.