Donald awoke to a cold bedroom, the dead light of the district streaming in through frost-rimed windows. He shivered and tried to pull the bedsheet over him when the room darkened briefly as something passed before the windows behind him.
“Hello?” asked Donald in a quavering voice. He rolled over in a series of grunts and saw what cast a shadow into his room.
The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently, approached. It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand. But for this, it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.
“I am in the presence of the Ghost of Warboners Yet To Come?” said Donald.
The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its skeletal hand.
“You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened but will happen in the time before us,” Donald pursued. “Is that so, Spirit?”
The Spirit had inclined its head and that was the only answer he received.
“Warboner of the Future!” Donald exclaimed, “I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?”
It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight before them.
“I don’t think it’s going to say anything, Donald,” said the hair from the floor.
“Douche move!” cried the hat.
“Quiet, you two,” said Donald. “I have the fear upon me when facing this silent Phantom. I fear to go with him.” He slid off the bed and gathered his friends from the chamber floor.
“Then don’t,” said the hat. “Fuck old tall and bony. It’s just the skeleton of John McCain probably. You can beat up a skeleton.”
“I could beat up a skeleton,” said the hair. “No muscle, no tendon, no offal or sinew. I never knew what was supposed to me so scary about skeletons in the first place.”
Donald put on his hair and hat and stood before the Phantom and crossed his arms in defiance.
“What is with the no talking thing, Oh, Spirit? Are you just trying to freak me out?”
“Or he doesn’t have lungs or larynx, lips or tongue to make speech with,” said a gay Southron voice. The front of the dark robe of the Phantom split and a terribly aged Lindsey Graham stepped out.
“Ta-da!’ said Lindsey and launched a double handful of glitter into the air.
The hat and hair groaned loudly in musical union.
Lindsey stepped to the side and crooked an arm through the arm of the Phantom. He self-consciously touched his hair with his other hand and sighed.
“I love John McCain,” said Lindsey gravely. “I love him. He can no longer talk, so I shall be his voice.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” said the hat.
“Lead on, O Spirits of the Future,” said Donald. “Show me what you must.”
Lindsay tittered behind his free hand. “Come on, boys,” Lindsey said. The Phantom at his side raised his hand and darkness, absolute darkness, enveloped them.
“Spooky,” Lindsey giggled.
They scarcely seemed to enter the city; for the city rather seemed to spring up about them, and encompass them of its own act. But there they were, in the heart of it; on the Capitol steps. The Spirit stopped beside one little knot of Congressmen. Donald advanced to listen to their talk.
“No,” said a great fat man with a monstrous chin, “I don’t know much about it, either way. I only know he’s dead.”
“When did he die?” inquired another.
“Last night, I believe.”
“Why, what was the matter with him?” asked a third, taking a vast quantity of cocaine out of a very large snuff-box. “I thought he’d never die.”
“God knows,” said the first, with a yawn.
“What has he done with his money?” asked a red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.
“I haven’t heard,” said the man with the large chin, yawning again. “Left it to his feckless offspring, perhaps. He hasn’t left it to me. That’s all I know.”
This pleasantry was received with a general laugh.
“It’s likely to be a very cheap funeral,” said the same speaker, “for upon my life I don’t know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?”
“I don’t mind going if a lunch is provided,” observed the gentleman with the excrescence on his nose. “But I must be fed, if I have to go.”
Another laugh.
“Well, I am the most disinterested among you, after all,” said the first speaker, “for I never wear black gloves, and I never eat lunch. But I’ll offer to go if anybody else will. When I come to think of it, I’m not at all sure that I wasn’t his most particular friend; for we used to stop and speak whenever we met. Bye, bye!”
Speakers and listeners strolled away and mixed with other groups. Donald knew the men and looked towards Lindsay for an explanation, but the piss-eyed fairy just giggled.
The Phantom glided on into a street. Its finger pointed to two persons meeting. Donald listened again, thinking that the explanation might lie here.
He knew these men, also, perfectly. They were men of business: very wealthy, and of great importance. He had made a point always of standing well in their esteem: in a business point of view, that is; strictly in a business point of view.
“How are you?” said one.
“How are you?” returned the other.
“Well!” said the first. “Old Scratch has got his own at last, hey?”
“So I am told,” returned the second. “Cold, isn’t it?”
“Seasonable for Christmas time.”
“Good morning!” said the one; “Good morning!” said the other.
Not another word. That was their meeting, their conversation, and their parting.
Donald was at first inclined to be surprised that the Spirit should attach importance to conversations apparently so trivial; but feeling assured that they must have some hidden purpose, he set himself to consider what it was likely to be.
“Donald?” asked his hair. “Are you doing hard thinking? It’s starting to feel weird under me.”
“A moment, just a moment,” said Donald, “I wish to solve the riddle of these speakers I have been shown.”
The hat, way ahead of him, laughed his evilest laugh, which was an evil laugh indeed.
Quiet and dark, beside him stood the Phantom, with its outstretched hand. When Donald roused himself from his thoughtful quest, he fancied from the turn of the hand, and its situation in reference to himself, that the Unseen Eyes were looking at him keenly.
“Spirit!” said Donald, shuddering from head to foot. “I see, I see. The case of this unhappy man might be my own. My life tends that way, now. Merciful Heaven, what is this?”
He recoiled in terror, for the scene had changed, and now he almost touched a bed: a bare hospital bed: on which, beneath a ragged sheet, there lay a something covered up. A pale light, falling through a grimy window, fell straight upon the bed; and on it, plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept, uncared for, was the body of this man.
Donald glanced towards the Phantom. Its skeletal hand was pointed to the head. The cover was so carelessly adjusted that the slightest raising of it, the motion of a finger upon Donald’s part, would have disclosed the face. He thought of it, felt how easy it would be to do, and longed to do it; but had no more power to withdraw the veil than to dismiss the spectre at his side.
“Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death,” said the hat gleefully, “set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. Strike, Skeleton McCain, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal!”
“What the fuck are you doing?” asked the hair.
“Just watch,” the hat said maliciously and Lindsey did giggle his giggle again and again.
The hat’s words tore at Donald. He thought, if this man could be raised up now, what would be his foremost thoughts? He lay, in the empty hospital, with not a man, a woman, or a child, to say that he started a glorious war in this country or that, or invaded a territory here or there, or sent a flight of cruise missiles to a children’s hospital?
“Spirit! Gay fairy!” he said, “this is a fearful place. In leaving it, I shall not leave its lesson, trust me. Let us go!”
Still the Ghost pointed with an unmoved finger to the figure under the sheet.
“I understand you,” Donald returned, “and I would do it if I could. But I have not the power, Spirit. I have not the power.”
“Pull back the sheet, Donald,” said Lindsay. “Find what you already know you will.”
“If there is any person in the town, who feels emotion caused by this man’s death,” said Donald, quite agonized, “show that person to me, Spirit, I beseech you!”
The Phantom spread its dark robe before him for a moment, like a wing; and withdrawing it, revealed a room by daylight, where a mother and her children were.
Sarah was expecting someone, and with anxious eagerness; for she walked up and down the room; started at every sound; looked out from the window; glanced at the clock; tried, but in vain, to work with her needle; and could hardly bear the voices of the children in their play.
At length, the long-expected knock was heard. She hurried to the door, and met her husband; a man whose face was careworn and depressed. There was a remarkable expression in it now; a kind of serious delight of which he felt ashamed, and which he struggled to repress.
“Is it good?” she said, “or bad?”
“Bad,” he answered.
“We are quite ruined?”
“There is no hope, Sarah. He is gone.”
“Gone? Gone? What shall I do? My speaking fees are all that keep us going! If he is gone, who will hire me now if not to curry his corrupt favor? No one cares for his past, there are no glories to promote, not conflicts to rehash. We are ruined, husband, ruined!”
“I have never seen Pie so sad where I had not been the author,” Donald said quietly.
“Hark!” said the hat. “Is that the sound of the other shoe finally dropping?”
“Don’t be cruel,” the hair chided the hat.
“I’m bored,” the hat said. “And cold and hungry and bored. This cheap epiphany has been too long coming.”
Lindsay laughed and laughed and rubbed intimate bones underneath the robe of the Phantom. “Take us back, lover, take us back,” he said in a Southron lisp.
In the hospital room once more, and Lindsay did prance forward and tear the sheet away. Donald himself lay there on that cold bed, his orange tan now pallid, his angry cheeks sunken and sallow, his tweeting thumbs still and gnarled, his belly filling with gases and putrefactions.
“No!” cried Donald. “No! The old Jew told me that I could never die!”
“All men die, Donald,” the hair told him not unkindly.
“And that was just Dr. Blankenweiss, who was checking your moles,” said the hat.
“But this is just death, cold and unforgiving,” Donald wailed. “I am a President! I should be lying in state? Where are the mourners? Where are the women crying? Where is the non-stop press coverage?”
Lindsay began to laugh so hard, he could barely catch his breath. His face turned as red as a freshly-slapped ass. The Phantom raised his arms and the scene changed again, a small chapel filled with a few people and a closed casket of plain wood appeared around them. The Phantom put his arm around Donald and they floated toward the coffin. Donald was left there as the Phantom retreated.
“This is it?” cried Donald. “This is my funeral?”
“Pretty cheap looking,” the hair said.
“Not very classy,” the hat agreed.
Donald turned to look at the mourners. Ivanka sat stone-faced in the front pew, Jared beside her in a yarmulke, their Jew-children bored and sleeping. Don Jr. was working a Rubik’s Cube and quietly cursing and Eric was wearing sunglasses that did not cover the bruises on his face.
“This is all you mourn me? Where is Melania? Where is her son?” Donald asked.
“She divorced you years ago,” said Lindsay smiling.
“And Tiffany? Tell me nothing has happened to her?”
“Who?” Lindsay said, his Botoxed brows straining to knit.
“Tiffany? My youngest daughter? Marla’s daughter?” Donald asked in exasperation.
Lindsay, still confused, looked askance of The Phantom of Warboners to Come and the Spirit did shrug elaborately.
“And the cameras and reporters?” asked Donald. “Did the Phantom take them? Are they in hiding?”
“I don’t think they are coming, Donald,” the hair said gently.
“Not even FOX NEWS?!?”
“There is no more Fox News,” Lindsay hissed. “Because of you. They went out of business with no wars to report, no drone strikes to defend, no war crimes to excuse! You! You killed them, Donald!”
“NO!” screamed Donald. “No! How can this horrible future be mine! I was a great President! A tremendous President! The first Twitter President! I gave up my thumbs for you ingrates!”
“Look!” said Lindsay. “Look who they sent to speak at your funeral!”
A hulking figure approached the podium behind the gasket, shrouded in darkness, hideous and twisted.
“NO!” cried Donald and the hat and the hair in unison.
“Oh, Spirit! Oh, comraderal homo!” moaned Donald. “Tell me that this can not be. My mind and soul cannot take these blows and shocks! I have learned the harsh lessons you teach! Take me home! Please return me!”
Donald fell to his knees before McCain enrobed skeleton and wept bitterly. Chelsea’s voice was clear and loud when she began to speak, but grow tinny and indistinct.
“I can look no more!” wept Donald. “I can hear no more!”
“Pinch me!” cried the hat. “This shit ain’t funny no more!”
Donald pitched forward onto the floor of his bedroom as there was no more Phantom leg bones to clutch. Lindsay’s mocking laughter echoed for a few seconds more.
Donald stood up and waddled to the window. It was light outside. It was morning.
“OK, that really sucked,” said the hair.
“Torments from hell,” the hat agreed. “Her voice; that harridan screech. And her face. Her awful face. I will never be able to wipe it from my mind.”
Donald held onto the window sill and continued to weep.
