Over the fade, Denny announced, "that was Garbage, Rancid and Hurl.  A genuine pukepak here on 100.1...The One." One of his main claims to radio fame was never pre-taping any of his voices.  This morning, he'd intended to take it easy on himself by limiting the characters to Bob the Janitor and  Squint Hardwood. But then, he'd wanted to say a few things that only Mrs. Wheezley would say, and Mr. DoLittle just sort of fell into the conversation. Before he knew it, the whole gang was in the studio and Denny could barely think over the uproar.
        "Garbage?" said Mrs. Wheezley. "Why can't you just play Montovani? You know what   happens when you play this alternative junk?  None of the money they make goes back into the economy.  It all ends up in the hands of  the drug lords.  The criminal element."
        "Ah, yes," said Mr. DoLittle drunkenly. "The hidden economy.  D'joo know it's bigger than the real economy?  Back when I worked at the treasury, we spent losha time trying to figure out how to tap into it."
        "Yeah," agreed Bob the janitor. "My uncle owned a chain of drugstores.  Bought himself a castle in England complete with a title."
        "Now he's a drug lord? Right?" said Squint Hardwood.
        "No. Actually he's a Baron."
        "A Baron?  Okay, I give up.  What's the punchline?"
        "That was it."
        Mrs. Wheezley broke back in.  "Quick, put on a song before he tries to tell another joke."
        "I don't have Montovani," Denny said in his real voice as he cued his producer to spin the song.
 "Here is Cruel Device, with an...unusual take on Glen Campbell.  "Genitals on My Mind".
       "Play anything!  Just drown him..."  Mrs. Wheezley shrieked, but Denny's voiced cracked.  He managed to flick off the mic switch and signal Nick to punch the cd play button before breaking into a long and vicious coughing fit.
        Nick came over to him.  "You alright, Den?"
        "Yeah.  Fine.  Guess I..should lay off Mrs. Wheezley for the rest of the show."
        "Well, you've definitely got her sounding Wheezy," Nick laughed.
        Denny gave his producer the evil eye.  Then stood up grinning,  "Just segue through the next commercial break for me, willya, Nick?  I'm gonna go find something to gargle with."
        "You really shouldn't, man."
        The kid's nervous look made Denny smile.  If  Denny lost his job,  Nick probably would probably lose his too -- or at least take a healthy pay cut.  Loyalty to Denny paid forty thousand a year.  The Denny O'Callahan Show was number 1 in the state, even while host's life was falling apart.  Maybe party because of it.  The  resulting angst made him meaner.  And the more caustic and irreverent Denny got, the higher his ratings climbed.
        "In fact, it would make a good segment.  Let's do it on air."
        At the end of the song, Denny came in over the fade, gargling.  Then he made a loud spitting sound and clunked the metal part of a spoon gently against the mesh mic-head.
        "I wish Squint would quit doing that with good scotch.  It's such a waste," said Mr. Do-Little.
        "Not to worry, doofus.  The bottle's filled with moonshine.  Part of your hidden economy."
        "And it's probably rotgut."
        "Actually, it's not bad."
        "Really?  How 'bout a drink then."
        "Sell you the rest of the bottle for a buck."
        "That's quite untenable."
        "Loosen up, pal.  Who's gonna know or care you spent a buck on something illegal?"
        "S'not that.  I just don't have a dollar.  How's 83 cents."
        Denny held the mic to his throat as he took a big swallow from the bottle, then in the Squint voice he said, "now it's worth 83 cents."  And he cued Nick to go into commercials.
        In the next stop-set, he drank another glass.  And somehow, he made it through the show with almost half a bottle to spare.
        A cutting-edge, ratings grabber, for sure.
        In the cab on his way home, Den found himself thinking about the stare that Nick had fixed on him by the end of the show.  A stare filled with awe; which was formed of equal parts fear, respect, astonishment, impotence and anger.

        An empty bottle sat on the thick oak end table in Denny's sparsely furnished living room, with a coterie of dirty plastic glasses gathered round it, like sheep unto a shepherd.
        He turned his gaze back to the other occupants of the room; DoLittle sat at the glass table in the breakfast nook,  a pasty-faced bureaucrat absently chasing an ice cube around the bottom of his scotch glass with a fingertip, occasionally pausing to twist his moustache with liquor marinated fingertips.  He shared many of Denny's personality traits, including his fear of reality.  If Denny didn't buy another bottle,  DoLittle would sit there all night, nervously probing his whiskers with his tongue for the vagrant taste of Johnny Walker, and loudly smacking his lips whenever he hit pay dirt.
        "Let's blow this pop stand," said a rotund man, clad in dirty white coveralls with the name Bob scripted in uniform blue on the breast pocket.   He had Denny's prematurely gray hair, but where Denny was reasonably fit, Bob had expanded to a sort of cartoon obesity.  His puffy pink cheeks protruded more than the red nose, which perched like a hemorrhoid in the middle of his face.
        "Mr. Do-Nothing would rather just sit here and drink," said a lean, black-clad man who bore a faint resemblance to what Denny would have looked like twenty years ago if he'd grown up on the street instead of in his parent's sprawling Broadmead home..  Squint Hardwood was a good name for him  "Or are we out of Scotch again?"
        "I wouldn't be if you assholes didn't drink it all," Denny said. " It's your turn to go out and get some.  You four are drinking me into the poorhouse."
        "Three," said Squint.
        "Three?"  said Denny, now looking suspiciously around the room for the missing entity.  "You really don't remember, do you?"
        "Remember what?"
        "You killed off Wheezley this morning," said Mr. DoLittle.
        "Throat cancer," Squint said, barking out a laugh.
        Denny's gaze leaped from face to face around the room.  He honestly couldn't remember much  that happened on the show after the mouthwash incident.  Had he honestly killed off Mrs. Wheezley?
        "Yeah, you did, asshole.  But, you should have known she wouldn't give up that easily."  Squint drove his little stiletto switchblade into the antique walnut coffee table, and Denny winced, even though he should have been used to it.
        "Now look what we have to put up with," said Squint.
        On cue, Mrs. Wheezley faded into existence.  Problem was, she really was dead and she was already starting to rot.  The room filled with the stench of her.
        Her eyes were open, fixing Denny with her cold, shrewd stare.  "I'll bet half a million people tune in for the play-by-play of my decomposition."
        "Decomposition?  You must be one of those decomposers," said Squint Hardwood, holding out a cross of forefingers.  "Maybe even the Anti-Bach!"
        Wheezley ignored the interruption. "You can use the whole sordid matter as an excuse to discuss issues like medical ethics, doctors on drugs, euthanasia, VD, AIDS."
        "See the can of worms you've opened?" taunted Hardwood.
        "He's rather crude.   But he has a point.  We've stumbled into a cornucopia of good material."
        "She's listened to too many radio commercials," inserted Hardwood. "She's starting to sound like one.  Cornucopia?  That's pretty ripe."
        Wheezley ignored him.  "I'll be your hotline to the hereafter, do interviews with dead people, God, whatever.  This is the best thing that ever happened to you, Dennis."
        "What are they talking about?" asked Bob.
        Conversation stopped as everybody looked at him standing there like one of the Three Stooges.  And even Denny laughed.  Then he went out and got another bottle.

        Later that night, the characters he'd created tried to talk him into murder.
        "That's totally stupid," Denny protested when Hardwood came up with the idea.
        They were sitting in a corner table at a sparsely inhabited Karaoke bar.  The place was plush purple and chrome.  The small black stage at the far end of the room was notably empty, but the spotlight remained lit for anyone who wanted to wander into it.  Partway through the night, Bob the Janitor indulged an irresistible urge to croon.  He sang Moon River, never taking his eyes off the lyric sheet through the whole song, but still managing to get the words wrong.
        The recessed light above them was burnt out.  Denny had picked this table for that reason, but now regretted it, because he couldn't see the look on Hardwood's face to tell if he was serious about murdering Lana.
        "She deserves it," argued Hardwood.  "She left you at the time you needed her more than ever.  Just stayed with you until the bank account got big enough, then took her cut and kicked you out."
        "What she deserves is a fucking medal," replied Denny. " For putting up with all of us for so long."
        "What do you mean, us, asshole?" said Hardwood.
        "To her, we're all part of you," breathed Wheezley's corpse.
        "She can't tell the difference, can you tell the difference?" said Bob, mimicking one of Denny's least favourite commercials.
         Sitting silently, too drunk to talk or reason or argue, DoLittle drained another glass.
        "Your wife is responsible for this!" said Hardwood, sweeping his hand around the table at the drunk, the corpse and the clown.
        "No." Denny sat shaking his head with his eyes closed.
        "Would you have allowed this to happen if Lana had stayed with you?"
        Denny continued shaking his head.
        "Now she's probably screwing some other guy.  Maybe  Nick.  She's always had the hots for him, even though she'd never admit it.  I bet that's just what she's doing."
        "I know it's what she's doing,"  said Wheezley.  She looked even more hideous in the semi-darkness than she did in the light.  And she proceeded to answer his unspoken question,
        "I have connections in the spirit world."
        Denny couldn't believe he was sitting here taking part in this conversation.  Finally, he climbed to his feet, walked out and stomped angrily down the street to his apartment.  Striding along beside him, Hardwood said in even patient tones,  "You can't run away from us."
       A moment later, Wheezley was floating ghost-like in front of him, sliding backward down the street as he walked toward her.   And Bob jogged breathlessly beside them.
 Looking over his shoulder, Denny said, "Well, I seem to have lost one of us."
     "Yeah, your only ally in this argument."
     "What about me?" puffed Bob.
     "You don't count."
     "I do too."
     "He does," Denny agreed.  He stopped and the others gathered around him.  There was still no sign of DoLittle.  "Bob's the only one of us who's utterly guileless.  Too stupid to have his own agenda."
     "True.  But what is such an opinion worth?" said Wheezley rhetorically.  "Are you suggesting that ignorance gives him the moral high ground?"
     "No.  Just that he has a much of a voice as anyone else," said Denny.
     "The right to vote, like?"  asked Hardwood.
 Denny scowled at him.  "Of course not.  You're not real."
     "Then he has no voice," said Wheezley.  "None of us have."
     "Sure you do.  300,000 people listen to you every weekday."
 Hardwood waved his little knife.  "You said Bob's opinion counted in this argument.  That almost sounded..."
     "Democratic," Wheezley finished the sentence for him.  "If his voice counts, then so do ours.  Right?"
     "Well, I..." Denny couldn't think of a response.
 Bob looked at him earnestly, then faced off against Squint and Wheezley.  "Of course he believes in democracy.  And I'm with Denny.  So that's two against two."
     "So Mr. DoLittle has the deciding vote?" hissed Mrs. Wheezley.
     Bob nodded dimly, "Yeah.  I guess he does."
     And Bob took Denny's arm.  This was something that had never happened before.  None of the characters had ever touched him before.  Then Squint took the other arm and the two characters from inside Denny's head propelled him back down the street toward the Karaoke Bar.
     "You're back, Mr. O'Callahan?"
     "Where is he?"
     "Who?"
     "Mr. DoLittle?"
     "Mr. DoLittle not leave with you?"
     "Oh.  There he is!"
     As the troupe approached, DoLittle lifted his head from the table.  His face was streaked with tears and cigarette ashes.  He stood up and roared, "I say kill the bitch!"
     As DoLittle stumbled toward them, Denny's two escorts spun him around and marched him back toward the entrance.
     "Did you find your friend, Mr. O'Callahan?"
     "Yeah, thanks," Denny heard Mr. DoLittle responding.  "Call us a cab, will you?"
     "Sure thing Mr. O'Callahan."

     The cab stopped.  "That'll be $7.25."
     Bob opened the door and got out.  Hardwood pushed Denny face first onto the grassy curb.
     "Hold on a minute, asshole!"  the cabby shouted.
     Turning and sticking his head in the car window, Hardwood wagged the knife like Denny's mother used to wag her finger and said, "Denny O'Callahan.  I have a tab."
     "Not anymore, dickhead!"  As the taxi squealed off down the posh residential street, the driver reached for his radio.
     "Okay, that's it!" said Denny, climbing slowly to his feet.  His knees and elbows were soaked from the wet grass.
     "That's what?" asked Bob.
     "Yes, what," echoed Mrs. Wheezley.
     "I'm not playing along anymore."
     "Like you have a choice?" said Squint.
     "Damned right I do," shouted Denny, taking a wild swing at his young, fit, sober opponent.
     Squint grabbed Denny's arm and had him in an armlock a second later.
     "Take his other arm, Bob."
     "No, Bob.  I'm going to put my foot down.  We can't go through with this."
     "The decision was already made.  3 to 2.  Democracy, Bob.  Think of all the people in this world who have fought and died for democracy.  And take his fucking arm, Bob!"
     With bison-faced resolve, Bob took Denny's other arm.
     "No, Bob.  Let go..."
     Noticing that the harder he pleaded, the tighter Bob squeezed, Denny finally shut up.
     "We should've parked closer to the house," said Bob, huffing noticeably before they got a half a block up the street.
     "We couldn't let Lana see us getting out of the car," said Squint.
     But Mrs. Wheezley was in a more eloquent frame of mind.  "That's what we hate the most about you, Bob.  You can never think of anything intelligent to say.  We should have left you at home to watch "Hilarious Home Videos". And leave the thinking part to us."
     After a moment of silence on everyone's part, Bob said, "Hey, Mrs. Wheezley.  How many millenniums are in an era?"
     "That's millennia.  Actually, it's funny you should ask that, Bob.  I have a theory.  This is the big one, the end of an era. We're on God's Etch-a-Sketch and the old bastard has the shakes."
    Mrs. Wheezley lit up a cigarette.
     "You said you were gonna quit when you died," Hardwood snickered.  "No need for that shit in the afterlife."
     Giving him a freezing glare, Wheezley said, "You'll know soon enough."
     "Whattdya mean by that?  Is this inside information?  You telling me that even those bastards on the other side are corrupt?"
     "Shhhh," said Mrs. Wheezley somehow managing to suppress a cough,  "We're getting close to the house."
     As they came up to the gate on the driveway, Squint turned to DoLittle, who followed half-a-dozen noiseless paces behind them, pausing every so often to drink from the bottle in his hand.
     "That's not Scotch you're drinking that way, is it?"
     As DoLittle staggered up to them, he held up the bottle and said.  "Don worry, I lef plenny for ya!"
     Grabbing the three-quarters full bottle from the drunk, Hardwood passed it to Bob, who took a quick, teary-eyed swig.
     "I gave it to you to hold, you idiot.  Don't drink it."
     "I'm just nervous.  It's not everyday I murder people."
     "Good point," said Squint, grabbing the bottle for a serious swig before swatting DoLittle's hand away and thrusting the bottle back at Bob.
     "It's my turn," moaned DoLittle.
     "Shhhh," said Wheezley.
     "You guys hold O'Callahan," Squint instructed.
     As soon as DoLittle took hold of Denny's arm, Squint let go of him to pick the lock.  DoLittle was so busy staring at the bottle in Bob's hand, that he never even glanced up at Denny.  This was his chance to escape.
     Frantically, Denny pulled out of DoLittle's grasp.  But Bob held on tight. In a move that he'd seen on World Wide Wrestling, Denny ducked under Bob's arm, twisting sharply.  And Bob hit him with the bottle.
     The blow felt like a stake being pounded from the back of his neck straight through the back of his skull, and Denny realized that the double impact was from coming down, face first on the asphalt.  Voices somehow penetrated the pain that filled his brain like angry video snow.
     "...asshole.  If you had killed him it would be the end of all of us...c'mon, get him up...keys for this door..."
     Something flopped like a fish toward Denny's groin, and he opened his eyes to see DoLittle reaching in the other trouser pocket for his key ring.  A few months earlier , when Denny had come to get his golf clubs when Lara wasn't home, he had discovered that, unlike the front and back door keys, his basement key still worked.
     As they walked him into the basement, Squint twisted Denny's arm up into a hammerlock again.
     "One squawk out of you and I break it," Squint whispered.
     And they all walked silently up the stairs.
     Denny realized with a dull glimmer that the stairs were carpeted.  As a kid, Denny had broken his arm slipping and falling down carpeted stairs, so as he'd grown in age and popularity, graduating to richer and richer houses, he had never allowed carpeted stairs in any of them.
     But this was no longer his house.
     Noticing that the pressure of the hammerlock eased off with each step he climbed, Denny bounded up the last two stairs to the landing.  Twisting out of Squint's grip, Denny pushed open the door, dove through and used his feet to slam it on Squint's still groping arm.
     "Lana!"  Denny bellowed into the darkened kitchen, "Get out of the house!"
     Like a real ghost, Mrs. Wheezley floated through the door and hovered above him.  "Getting caught here won't do your career much good at all.  Although I hear Folsom Prison has an in-house radio station. All Johnny Cash, all the time!  Unless you want to live in a 24 hour "burning ring of fire", let's just do what we came for and vamoose."
     A mighty push from the other side of the door propelled Denny like a toy race car across the linoleum floor.  Scrambling to his feet, he groped on the counter for the kniferack which had always been there but all he found was a 4 slice pop-up toaster, which he hurled at Squint.  When it reached the end of the cord, it stopped in mid-air and dropped noisily to the floor. At least the distraction gave him time to find the kniferack.  Denny pivoted, brandishing a carving knife big enough to behead a buffalo with one whack.
     "Denny?" said a scared and sleepy voice from somewhere nearby.
     "Lana!  Run for it!"
     "What?"  She came into the kitchen and flicked on the light.
     She looked great in her short, white, terrytowel bathrobe.  Denny's gaze slid up those long, evenly tanned legs until it settled on the gun she was training on him.
     "What are you doing with a gun.  You hate guns."
     "What are you doing with the knife?"
     "Protecting you."
     "From what?"
     "Them," Denny said weakly, realizing that she still couldn't see her would-be-murderers; Squint turning on her with a maniacal grin and Wheezley swooping around the room in perverse glee, while Bob and DoLittle stood side by side in the basement door.  Lana had never been able to see them.
     "The silent alarm went off, Denny.  The police are on their way.  So put down the knife, give me the basement key and get out of here before they arrive."
     "She's lying," said Squint, nodding toward the alarm box. "the light isn't on.  She forgot to arm it."
 Brandishing his little blade with a musketeer-like flourish, Squint stepped toward Lana.
     "No!" Denny screamed, raising the knife over his head and lunging toward Squint.
     Thinking that Denny was attacking her, Lana shrieked, closed her eyes and pulled the trigger.  But it was Bob she hit.  With an astonished look at the growing red stain on his ample belly, Bob said, "but I was one of the good guys."  The basement door slammed all the way open as the fat janitor toppled face down onto the floor.
     The noise startled Lana so much that she squeezed off another shot, this time taking out Mr. DoLittle who fell down the stairs, hitting bottom with the sound of smashing glass.
     Then she stood staring in amazement as Denny was shoulder-flipped by her still-invisible assailant, Squint.  As her ex-husband lay near-unconscious on the floor, something sharp sliced into her hand sending the gun spinning across the floor.  Invisible hands grabbed her by the throat and slammed her against the wall.
     And she heard a voice, just like the Squint Hardwood character she'd been listening to for years.
     "You never cared enough to look for us.  That's why you can't see us.  Betcha care now, eh?"
     When Lana's eyes opened wide and she gasped, having obviously just seen Squint for the first time, he began to strangle her in earnest.
     Groggily, Denny reached for the gun.  He'd smashed his head so many times in the last ten minutes, he literally couldn't see straight.  But after groping for a moment he came up with it.  Aiming it was even harder, especially with Mrs. Wheezley floating obstructively between him and his target.
     "Why do you want to save her?  She's thumphing  *** indignantly, Mrs. Wheezley faded away.
     Denny carried Lana to her bed.  She woke up as her head hit the pillow.
     "They're real?" she finally said.
     Denny nodded.  "But we killed them.  Squint and Bob and DoLittle.  They made me come here with them.  They wanted to kill you."
     "It's impossible...they can't...you must have..." Lana stuttered, trying not to look obvious about reachin for the brass lamp on the night table.
     Denny grabbed her ankle and she screamed.
     "You said you couldn't live with them anymore, Lannie-honey.  And now they're gone."
     She stared hard into his eyes.  "You stupid jerk.  They're your entire livelihood. Without them, you're worthless.  Who'll listen to Denny O'Callahan?  You'd better go out there and check on them."
     He felt completely sober now.  He had sacrificed everything for this?  He didn't know where to look, until four ghostly figures drifted through the exact spot on the wall where his gaze was locked.
     "See.  Even she knows that you need us more than you need her," said Wheezley
     "She's just jealous, man," said Hardwood.  "But we'd better get out of here in case a neighbour reported those gunshots."
     "You think somebody here in the spirit world will know how many millennia are in an eon?" asked Bob.