MARVEL 2000 PRESENTS...

"BOTTOMING OUT"

Written by Dale W. Glaser

The chamber had an alien quality, its pale blue columns and balusters of stone paradoxically ancient and advanced in equal measure. A tall figure in a long, heavy robe stood on a dais of concentric rings. The hood of the robe obscured the figure’s face, leaving nothing but shadows visible in its deep folds.

“Humanity is not the only race,” the figure intoned gravely. “And each race has its demons.”

The dais began to crumble in on itself, rotting into small chunks. Fractures appeared and multiplied in the columns, which cracked like brittle bones. The ceiling of the chamber began to collapse, raining fragments of the unearthly blue rock, from negligible flecks to jagged boulders, onto the robed figure.

The figure took no notice of the destruction, but repeated the words spoken earlier. Somehow the eerily calm voice penetrated the thunder of stone falling on stone. “Humanity is not the only race. Each race has its demons. Humanity is not the only race. Each race has its demons. Humanity is not …”

John Blaze awoke from the dream so suddenly that he was sitting upright with one foot on the floor before he realized the difference between sleep and consciousness. Slowly he took in his surroundings: the bare floor beneath his left foot; the peeling wallpaper on the four cramped walls surrounding him; the thin, dirty mattress on a rickety metal frame supporting his weight; the mingled smells of human waste and cheap cleaning products in the air. Every element, every sensation bore a weariness that bordered uncomfortably close to despair.

In other words, everything was exactly as it had been when he went to sleep.

Blaze walked out the front door of the building, passing under the neon sign that proclaimed it as the Evergreen Hotel, even though the owner and his guests knew it was a flophouse. A yellow taxicab splashed through a rain-filled pothole, but Blaze didn’t even bother trying to hail it. He turned his collar up against the chill and walked toward the corner.

The dream nagged at the back of his mind. It made him feel as if he belonged somewhere else, somewhere other than New York City, but Blaze couldn’t imagine where that would be. The feeling persisted despite his attempts to dismiss it, a vague sense that a specific destination awaited him and that if he jumped on his motorcycle and took to the open road, he would come across it sooner or later. It wasn’t the wanderlust of his youth; it was the troublesome worry of being late for a half-forgotten appointment.

Unable to sort the feeling out properly, Blaze resigned himself to simply ignoring it. Bizarre and cryptic dream or not, the last thing he wanted this morning was to get on his motorcycle. The motorcycle was part and parcel of Ghost Rider, and Ghost Rider had never felt more of a curse than it did now. So Blaze walked, turning east when he reached the cross street and heading for a nearby bodega.

He still didn’t know what he had been thinking when Stephen Strange had separated Noble Kale from Dan Ketch, although he supposed at the time he had barely been thinking at all. Dan was afflicted with an evil that somehow devolved him into an eater of living human flesh, and that evil somehow insinuated itself into the Spirit of Vengeance that Dan hosted as well. Strange, Blaze, Caretaker and Seer were barely able to contend with an insane, bloodthirsty Ghost Rider. Then everything happened far, far too quickly. Strange separated Noble Kale, then immediately banished Dan, still wracked with hellish and insatiable hunger, to a distant plane. Without a host, Kale would cease to exist. That was when Blaze volunteered.

No, dammit, he didn’t volunteer. Blaze had merely pointed out why he was unsuitable as a host, only to have Doctor Strange contradict him, proclaiming Blaze less suffused with hellfire than he had been previously. Dan was gone, Kale was discorporating and running out of time. Blaze needed the services of the sorcerer supreme to deal with an infant monster left in his care. Then, there, in that impossible moment of non-choice, Blaze had allowed the Ghost Rider to be bonded to him once more.

Blaze stepped through the doorway of the cramped bodega, ringing a bell over the steel-mesh door as he passed through. He grabbed a cling-wrapped empanada from a shelf, realized how hungry he was, and grabbed two more. He knew the empanadas were good; he’d been subsisting on them since he had arrived at the Evergreen Hotel … how many weeks ago? He took them to the counter, added an orange from a nearby basket, and paid the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper smiled as she handed back his change, but Blaze was unable to smile back. “Gracias,” he muttered dully.

He had come to the Evergreen Hotel after riding aimlessly around New York City for hours, which in turn had come after Roxanne had thrown him out of the house. As soon as he had returned to his wife, Blaze knew he was living on borrowed time. Roxy was glad to see that her husband had disposed of the newborn devil creature, and both of them had entered a tacit agreement not to discuss the details. Roxy was only too happy to avoid discussion of the supernatural, but Blaze knew that sooner or later she would discover the price he had paid.

Life in the Blaze household had been back to normal for less than a week. John and Roxy had gotten a babysitter for Craig and Emma, then gone in to Little Italy for a celebratory dinner. They talked about the future. They fed each other penne vodka and fra diavolo. They remembered how good they were together. They walked down Mulberry Street after dinner without a care in the world.

Then, two blocks ahead of them, police lights and sirens. A car spinning out of control and crumpling a lamppost. A driver limping out of the wrecked car and brandishing a gun. Police jumping out of arriving patrol cars. Shots fired on both sides. Officer down.

Doctor Strange had said that Noble Kale would be weakened for some time after bonding with John Blaze. Doctor Strange had said that Blaze would be in complete control of the Ghost Rider. Doctor Strange, it turned out, was not infallible.

A rush of infernal flame consumed Blaze’s head and stripped it to a gleaming white skull in an instant. Roxanne screamed, just one more shout in the night as the shootout continued ahead of them, and she pulled violently away. In the next heartbeat, the fugitive was shot and killed by the slain officer’s partner. With vengeance meted out, Kale was unable to resist Blaze’s will, and the flesh of Blaze’s face knitted itself back together as the demonic halo faded.

Roxy said nothing as John drove them both back to their home in the suburbs. And when they were both inside, and the babysitter sent home, she offered only two words: “Get out.”

John tried to explain that he had had no choice. Roxy said, “Get out.” John insisted that he would never allow her or the children to be harmed. Roxy said, “Get out.” John begged her to see that they could never live a life completely free of the taint of the occult, and that at least the Spirit of Vengeance was one aspect he was already familiar with. Roxy said, “Get out.” Her heart was broken and her soul was terrified and she could only express her grief and rage in that one, short command. John walked out the front door, climbed on his bike, and sped back into the city, prowling the streets until nearly dawn.

Three days later Blaze tried to call his estranged wife, but the phone number had been disconnected. Now he imagined she was most likely already somewhere else, moving on, starting over. Blaze, on the other hand, had spent most of his time drinking enough so that he could sleep, and eating just enough to stay alive, with occasional forays to the liquor store for bottles or to the bodega for empanadas. Ironically, the Ghost Rider had not manifested itself since the shootout in Little Italy, not even once.

As he walked out of the bodega, Blaze found himself passing a wall covered in graffiti, much of it a crude back-and-forth between pro-mutant and anti-mutant sentiments. Among the epithets and the directives to perform sex-based anatomical impossibilities was a jarringly high-minded statement in spraypaint: HUMANITY IS NOT THE ONLY RACE.

Blaze tore open one of the empanadas and bit off a corner. He had probably walked past that graffiti a dozen times; that, at least, explained where that weird recurring phrase in his dream had come from. He wondered who had added the words to the wall. An agitated mutant? An idealistic human sympathizer? A bored kid trying to be intellectually rebellious?

Blaze shook his head. Human-mutant relations were a problem, but he couldn’t work up much sympathy for them. His wife wanted nothing to do with him and had taken herself and his children beyond his reach. His brother was suffering, possibly dying, from some kind of malignant possession, and banished from Earth as a result. His ancestor’s vengeance-obsessed spirit was bonded to his own, and it was only a matter of time before the demon would loose itself again. His body was suffering from too much alcohol, too little sleep, and he was technically homeless and almost out of money. Politics were for other people.

And yet the graffiti had reminded him of the dream, and the feeling that he needed to race toward some far-off finish line was back in full force. No matter how hard he tried, Blaze could not completely shake that dark certainty. Then a bus rumbled down the street past him, not a member of the city transit fleet but an upscale motor coach. The windows were darkly tinted but Blaze could make out several of the occupants, white-haired senior citizens, mostly ladies, all smiling and laughing in anticipation of a pleasant excursion. The side of the bus featured a widescreen vista advertising its destination, a nighttime photo of tall buildings along the shoreline festooned with neon signs spelling out CAESAR’S, BALLY’S and TAJ MAHAL. ALWAYS TURNED ON! the billboard proclaimed across its top, while along the bottom the name of the coastal oasis was spelled out: ATLANTIC CITY.

As if a switch had been thrown inside his brain, Blaze knew that Atlantic City was the locus he was being drawn to. Accompanying that flash of insight was a sickening conviction that ignoring the specific idea would be far harder to accomplish than ignoring his formerly vague feeling of displacement. He could try to resist, but he would fail. He might as well get it over with.

Shoving the rest of the empanada in his mouth angrily, Blaze crossed the street in the diesel-smoke wake of the Atlantic City-bound bus and loped back towards the Evergreen Hotel. He bypassed its front entrance and headed down the side alley where his motorcycle awaited. Near the entrance to the alley, a grizzled old homeless man sat with his back against the brick wall. Blaze tossed the man his two unopened empanadas; he kept the orange, tucking it into the pocket of his jacket.

Blaze’s ride was beneath a black tarpaulin. Blaze yanked the shroud off and let it fall to the alley floor. Despite the gloom of the overcast late morning, the bike’s chrome and steel and leather and rubber seemed to sparkle and shine beckoningly. Blaze checked that his shotgun was still secure in its cradle just beneath the seat of the motorcycle, then threw his leg over the bike and kicked it to life. He eased it to the mouth of the alley and, with a roar like a mechanized dragon emerging from its cave, cruised down the street, winding his way toward the Verrazano Bridge.

Two hours of riding, mostly down the Garden State Parkway, brought Blaze to the Atlantic City Expressway, and soon his motorcycle was rumbling through the city itself. It was the off-season, and the growl of the engine echoed off weathered walls unblocked by passers-by. None of the buildings he rolled past seemed to be the epicenter of Blaze’s almost prescient urge to reach Atlantic City, and soon he found himself parking the motorcycle at a closed seasonal motel so that he could walk along the boardwalk.

The wind was keener and colder on the boardwalk, which was all but abandoned except for Blaze and a few noisy seabirds. Blaze walked past forlorn shops and unmanned game booths. His footsteps led him to Steel Pier, and along its jutting length out across the small breakers of the cold, gray-green ocean. He wove between inert amusement rides, incongruously candy-colored against the otherwise blanched surroundings, that seemed like the cast-off toys of a giant, petulant child.

When Blaze reached the railing at the end of Steel Pier, he stared out at the horizon, rendered fuzzy by the low-hanging clouds. Waves swelled against the concrete pylons beneath his feet, and Blaze contemplated throwing himself down into them. Suicide would land him in hell, but hell was a place he already knew pretty well, he reasoned. At least the struggle and the uncertainty would be over. He briefly wondered what would happen to Noble Kale then, and then wondered why he cared. For that matter, why had he cared what happened to the old spirit in Doctor Strange’s townhouse? If Noble Kale had vanished into the mystical ether, would it have made the world a lesser place somehow? Would it have done Dan Ketch any more harm? Would it have made Blaze’s own life any worse than it was now, utterly shunned by his wife and cursed to play host to the Spirit of Vengeance? A soul damned to hell would have a hard time exceeding the misery of John Blaze, or so it seemed to the man holding the pier railing in his clenched, gloved fists.

Then again, Blaze supposed as a wry smile touched the corner of his mouth, maybe that was just the effect New Jersey was having on him.

A large wave formed on the ocean’s surface, a few hundred yards out and directly in front of Steel Pier. The scroll of water gained both size and velocity as it surged towards landfall, its churning foam piling up to an impossible height at an alarming rate. John Blaze stared down the approaching tidal wave, rooted in place, convinced that he could almost make out a monstrous visage in the heaving convolution: dark, narrow, pitiless eyes and a slavering, fanged mouth in the very heart of the frothing spray. The shadow of the wave engulfed the end of Steel Pier as the towering wall finally crested, and Blaze had time for the barest coherent thought.

It wasn’t Atlantic City that had been calling to him. It was Atlantis.

And then the deluge fell like a column of lead, smashing cold and watery fury onto the man-made promontory. The end of Steel Pier was momentarily lost in a turbulent rush of seething white liquid. The supernatural wave drew back like the pale hand of a titan, dissolving into the choppy gray surface of the ocean. And the only evidence that a man had been standing on the pier was an orange slowly rolling across the wooden planks.

Author's Notes

Welcome to the beginning of what I hope will be a long, interesting, entertaining run on Ghost Rider! I have a great fondness for Johnny Blaze going back to some of my earliest childhood comic book reading memories (thank you once again, Mom and Dad, for hot hassling me about reading comics based on Satanism when I was eight!) and I’m really looking forward to putting my stamp on this character. Much thanks to Dave Golightly for approaching me with the opportunity. Since I’m taking over for the one and only Barry Reese, a writer I have the utmost admiration for, this issue is fairly consumed with making the transition from his first three issues to my new direction, in what I hope is a logical fashion. If you found it a bit light on action, rest assured – next issue will rev things up! See you then!

-DWG