The Hanging Hill

12

His soul swirls in the churning ectoplasm where it has spun in a spiral of overlapping circles for longer than he dares to remember.

He had been roasting in this eternal damnation when he first heard a voice calling him.

“Come forth, Michael Butler, I command you! Diamond Mike, come forth!”

And so he did—carrying his bloody meat cleaver.

He felt his soul chill, then rush up through a swirling current as if trapped under the earth’s crust inside a raging geyser. His spirit raced up from the underworld to the brink of life, never quite bursting free or crossing the threshold to the other side of death, never quite coming back to life.

Still, he recalls floating for brief moments across a vast expanse of darkness.

He remembers being hit with blindingly bright lights.

He remembers voices. Screams. Hushed murmurs. Angry men. Terrified women. The sparkle of jewels. Panic.

An audience.

Yes. He had been called into a theater, his summoned spirit put on momentary public display, his movements and very presence orchestrated by a coal-eyed man in a purple turban.

He remembers the turban.

The luminous green jewel shaped like a cockroach sitting at its center.

And then he remembers the man casting him away, sending him back into this numbing limbo to wait until he was called forth once more.

At every appearance, no matter how brief, Diamond Mike Butler longed to be restored to full existence. To be back in his living, breathing body. To rob and steal and kill again.

One time, he nearly made it all the way back.

One time, he almost crossed the threshold.

One time.

Perhaps he will get another chance.

Until then, the demon known in life as Diamond Mike Butler, the Butcher Thief of Bleecker Street, will wait.

He will wait in the churning nothingness beneath this place he remembers hearing the turbaned man calling the Hanging Hill Playhouse.

He will wait.