Big, Globby, Sloppy, Sleepy Monsters

The used-to-be ghosts grew taller and stronger,  more handsome by the moment.  But there were moans,  rattles, whispers, and burps filtering through the stadium.

"We didn't know we were wonderful kids.  We were just trying to get the goods and get out.   These sounds make us little nervous," Jeremy said.  "We didn't know that being Children of Alpha was a big, big help, and that being good-hearted was important.  Just didn't know."

Omega smiled at them and they begin to glow in the light of love, health, direction, talent and learning.  The ghosts actually had a future ahead of them, granted their future was in a very different place.

The noises got louder and louder.  Out of the corner of his eye Petey spotted a big, globby, sloppy, sleepy monster with one eye.  And then another, and then another.   Thousands were climbing out from under the seats, slurping and burping their way toward Omega, and the whole gang.  The monsters were greyish,  flat, circles, more like sting rays.

"What are you guys?  Tim asked.

"We're the monsters under the bed.  Sometimes we hide out in closets too.  We're pretty scary," the first monster said.  And he burped.

"Really?"  Petey said.  "Are you out to get us?"

"If we can catch you. . . "  the first monster said.

"Fat chance!"  Omega said.  And he held out his hands and bolts of lightning flew out of his finger tips, and landed on each of the monsters.  Petey thought they were going to have fried monster for dinner.
But each little blast of lightning changed the monsters into baby angels.  "Putti" the Italians call them.  They were little fat baby angels, and they began to play and tumble over each other.  And the burps and slurps turned into the sweet giggles and a few coos.  Love.

Soon, all the monsters were turned into babies with wings.

Cheryl, Suzie, and Julie were in love with the angels and kissed their little feet and sang songs to them.
The football stadium turned into a great, big playpen for little angels.

Alpha turned the bad monsters into baby angels, and the ghostie boys into tall, strong, talented knights of love and heart.  Omega said, "We get to have adventures, and we get to meet people, and  things more or less turn out for the best.  Now I'm gonna take them all home and check in with Alpha.  Try not to get into too much trouble until I get back."

Your Real and True Self

The stadium is dark and silent.  Omega and the gang, and the three tag-along ghosts are standing in the center of the field.  It's completely silent, odd for such a raucous place on a Saturday afternoon.

Then, almost silently comes the fluff of wings.  The sound, muffled and dignified, erupts until it sounds like the sky is filled with wings.   And then they appear.  Thousands of angels appear, hovering in midair.

They are a different kind of angel.  Most of the angels the gang thought about were sweet, womanly, and ethereal.  These angels were men, masculine, massive angels with golden shields, scarlet capes, and a 50 foot wingspan.  They were the ones singing Hosannah, swells of gorgeousness.

Omega stood up, front and center.  "Why are you here?"

"We are here to escort our three boys home—if they wish to come," the angel said.  "Do you wish to find your real and true selves and your real and true home?" he asked the three ghosts.

"Well, yeah, but,"  Harry said.

"Yes, or no," the angel said.  "Be very clear."

"Take a chance on yes," Omega coaxed.

"Yes."  Harry said.

"Yes," Buddy said.

"Yes, Sir!"  Jeremy said.

The three boys were outlined in silver, as the whispy, flimsy, greyish ghostly part of themselves faded, and the flesh and blood part of themselves, grew more and more solid until the boys were taller, more muscular, and, by the looks of things, utterly handsome lads, whom they could have been had they achieved their real, true selves.

They were magnificent.

"Do you wish to be forgiven for all of the mean, naughty things you have done?"  Omega asked.

"Yep," said Buddy.   All of us do.  I think that doing mean, naughty things changed who we were."

"Good thing," Petey said, "that when you know how to do better, you do better."

What Scares A Ghost.

"Anybody remember the ghosts?"  Tim was huffing and puffing.

There's nothing quite like having your  own tornado dismantle the very church you were standing in, leaving nothing but your self intact.  That spurred a hasty retreat.  The kids grabbed Marcus who didn't know what had happened. They raced to the nearest cliff outside of town and hid behind an immense rock.

"Rocks, I understand,"  Marcus said.

Up strolled Omega, Petey, and John-John, calm as the dawn.

"Did that make you all nervous?"  John-John asked.

"Oh, yeah,"  Larry said.  "What happened to the ghosts? Did we leave them behind?"

"Nope," Harry said.  "We were right behind you the whole time.  It takes a lot to scare a ghost.  That did it."

"Is there some place we could hide?"  Buddy said.

"How about the football stadium?"  Larry said.  "It's big, there are lots of places to hide, and the whole thing is set in concrete."

Off they go.  Marcus is still completely confused.  But Tim and Rick keep everybody together, even the  ghosties that are not entirely visible.  In about half an hour, they had found an unlocked door and had squirmed their way into the heart of the stadium.

The kids, Omega and his team, and the ghosts found a place on the football  field, and sat down, knees to knees.  They all felt safer when they could see everybody.  Even the ghosts sat, or softly drifted, inside the circle of knees.

The low rumbles started slow, more of a vibration, than a song.  It kept building, and kept building, until the whole stadium was buzzing with electricity.  The energy coalecsed into a sound, a lovely, multi-harmony rhythm, a song.  Hosannah.  Hosannah.  Hosannah.  

A song of Praise.

"No ghost mocks Alpha,"  Jeremy whispered.  "We know better."

Hosannah.  Hosannah.  Hosannah.

"Doesn't sound like anybody is gettin' fried,"  Tim said.

"Alpha doesn't fry people.  He tries to save everybody.  If there is one shred of goodness, one hint of a soft heart,  one breath that expresses a cares for anybody else. . ."  Omega said.

"So do people get fried?  At all?"  Julie wanted to know.

"The Fallen Angel of Dark Justice fries some people, but those people have to be really, really evil for a long, long time,"  Petey explained.  "They have to know that they are wrong-headed, doing bad, bad things—and not care.  And then, if they figure out they've been on the wrong, dark, sinister side of things, and try to be better, well, it may go better for them.  If they are just pretending, because if there's thing Alpha is good at, it's reading the human heart, then the pretending goes against them."

Hosannah.  Hosannah.  Hosannah.

"But if there is a sliver of good within you,"  John-John said.  "Maybe a day when you were kind to a kitty-or a kid; maybe you had a life that was miserable but you tried really hard to get even a few things right; maybe your poor heart loved, even a little bit.  Then you stand a chance."

It was one o'clock in the morning, and the place, except where the street light lit up the interior was as black as the far side of the moon.  And then a strange thing started to occur; the objects inside the stadium began to glow, to shine a little bit.  After awhile, it looked like the interior of the stadium was consumed with fire, except for this:  Nothing burned up, nothing was harmed by the heat.  It flared into a stadium-wide flame, floor to ceiling.

"It's a purification,"  John-John murmured.  "I wonder what needed cleaned up in here?"

"What about us?"  asked Harry.  "We're still really nervous around fire and flames.  And this is coming too dang close for comfort."

Hosannah.  Hosannah.  Hosannah.

The Hosannahs made the concrete floor vibrate, in fact, the whole place felt alive with a non-earthly energy.  Big, big, big energy.

Good Enough Ghosts

"Do you guys know Alpha?"  Harry asked.
"I'm part of his family," Omega said.  "Why?"
"We had a chance to go visit him when we died, but we didn't go,"  Buddy sighed.  "Hindsight. . . "
"Why didn't you go?"  Omega wondered.
"We  thought we could still get girls and have big fun, but we were wrong,"  Jeremy said.  "Oh, there are girls in our dimension, but I gotta admit, they are sort of creepy.   OK, they are really creepy."
"So we just try to scare the girls on the earth,"  Buddy said.  "Scare 'em real good."

"You guys all got girls,  how'd you do that?"  Jeremy asked.
"Yep,"  Larry said.  "Good ones too."
"How'd you do that?"  Buddy said.
"You gotta be a good guy," Tim said.
"Gotta be nice."
"Gotta be a love."
"Gotta be good."

"That kinda stuff?"  Buddy asked.
"Yep," said Rick.  "All that stuff."

"We thought all you had to be was cool."
"We thought all you had to be was sexy."
"We thought all you had to be was cute."

'You wish,"  Larry said.  "OK, it does help if you are cute."  Larry lifted both his eyebrows, a tease,
and grinned.

"Girls don't like it if you are weak."
"Girls don't like it if you are mean."
"Girls don't like it if you are dumb and lazy."

"Mainly,"  Omega said.  "You have to be alive.  That's basic."

"Oh, all right," Harry said.

Then a roaring sound reached the basement windows and rattled the window frames.  The crew walked upstairs to see what was happening.   The sound of the wind got bigger and bigger, and then bigger again.  Bigger.  The old church began to rattle and cracks appeared in the walls.  Then a turret fell off, and a steeple or two, the front foyer.  Bricks began to fly in every direction at once.  The sound was horrendous.  The screaming heebee jeebees.  The sounds of nails being  pulled out of boards left chills and goose bumps on Larry's arms.  Tim's tummy was queasy.     Hymnals flew every which way.  Pews, or those long benches, flew upwards toward the ceiling, then crashed back towards the floor.

The every thing went quiet.  An eerie, creepy quiet.

The kids walked outside to see what had happened to the neighborhood.

Nothing had happened to the neighborhood.  The tornado had only one landing point.
The church.  The half block where the church stood was the only parcel to have damage.

"Did you do that?"  Omega asked, indicating the three teen ghosts,

"We can rattle tea cups."
"And we can squeaky open a door."
"We can moan and grown in the furnace pipes."

"But, we can do that,"  Harry said.  "We're not good enough ghosts."

Ghosts of a Feather Flock Together

"We wanted to be bad boys, so we could get girls,"  Harry said.  Harry was a sidekick. personified.  He wasn't the best looking kid of the group, he wasn't the smartest. Mainly he was along for the ride and any of the girls left over from his most charismatic and better-looking friend, Jeremy.   Bubby, the littlest guy of the three, barely a teen, barely knew that he was dead.  He was having trouble seeing his peeps.

They had a tendency to fade in and out, to lose definition, to drift a little bit.  On earth there are three forms of matter, the gasses, the liquids, and the solids.  On the ghost side of things, there is only an image and a little bit of squeaky.  Most of the time, when you hear a creaking door slowly shutting, it's a ghost who is having trouble gathering enough energy to shut a door.  Once in a great while, you can hear a door slam shut, but mostly you hear the creaky doors, because  it's the best a poor ghost can do.

"How did you get dead?"  Larry asked the fading ghosts.

"It got away from us one night," Jeremy said.  They had materialized enough that the sound of his voice was clear.  "We were drinking and driving, chasing girls and having a high old time.  We were going to fast in two many directions all at once.  

A pause.

"But that wasn't it,"  Jeremy smirked.  

Completely odious giggles errupted from the three ghosts.   

"So, OK, I was teasing.  Actually, it was drugs and alcohol.   We're were partying hard.  And way over did it one Saturday night.  Woke up on this side of the curtain."  

Another pause while the three boys seems genuinely caught up in the grief that surrounded their lives.

"But that wasn't it, either,"  Jeremy laughed and not in a good way.

Really vile giggles.

"So, sorry about that," Jeremy chocked back the laughter.  

"You are increasingly dumb and dumber,"  Rick was exasperated.

"Speak the truth,"  Omega  wasn't laughing.  

"We drove off a cliff, backwards, in the dark.  Drove over a curb, over a sandy patch, then rolled down the cliff, we were dead before we hit the bottom,"  Buddy explained.  "I was driving.  First time.   Wasn't drinking, wasn't doping.  Just didn't pay attention to the warning signs."  

"Not the first kid to have that kind of trouble," Alpha said.

"Apparently not the last,"  Tim muttered.

"Now, we're stuck with each other.  For time and all eternity.  No girls either.  No wonder we're little stinkers,"  Buddy was  ever-so-sad.

















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