Ghost of a Dream

TEN YOU’VE GOT TO GET INTO THE SPIRIT OF THINGS

The living men and women stood close together on the Haybarn Theatre stage, staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the spot where Lissa had been standing. Or, at least, at where the thing they thought had been Lissa had been standing. They moved instinctively closer to each other, feeling the need for mutual support. Real people doing real human things, in the face of something long dead and only pretending to be human. A basic need for human warmth and human presence, to counter the cold of the grave and a close encounter with mortality. They needed to look into each other’s eyes and see someone they knew looking back. Actors might be used to dealing with people who aren’t who they appear to be, and Ghost Finders might be used to dealing with things that aren’t what they seem to be; but that only makes it that much harder to handle, knowing how completely you’ve been fooled.

Not all that surprisingly, JC was the first to get his mental feet back under him.

“Happy!” he said sharply, and the telepath jumped and gave JC his full attention.

“Yes, boss?”

“Is everyone else here real? Really real?”

“Way ahead of you,” said Happy. “I scanned everyone still on this stage the moment after Lissa did her disappearing act. Everyone left is who they appear to be. As far as I can tell. Something in this theatre has been messing with my head, and my abilities, ever since I got here.”

“How can we be sure about you?” Elizabeth said bluntly.

“Oh, trust me,” said JC. “No-one else could be that annoying.”

“You want me to prod you with a finger?” said Happy.

“Later, dear,” said Melody.

JC looked steadily at Benjamin and Elizabeth. “You knew Lissa. And you never suspected anything?”

“We never met her before!” said Elizabeth, immediately. “Not in the flesh…”

“I talked to her on the telephone a few times,” said Benjamin. “We knew her work, obviously, that’s why we hired her. But most of our contacts went through her agent. So when she turned up here, early, but looking exactly the way we expected her to, well…We never thought! Why would we?”

“So that was never the real Lissa,” said Happy. “All this time we’ve had two ghosts walking around with us, pretending to be people…And I never suspected anything!”

“My machines didn’t detect anything, either,” said Melody. “But then, I never knew the right questions to ask them. If it walks like a person and talks like a person…”

“We should have been on our guard,” said Happy. “Especially after what happened at the railway station…”

“Don’t be too hard on yourselves,” said JC, cutting in quickly before Benjamin and Elizabeth could start asking awkward questions about the railway station and really confuse the issue. “I’m the one with the special all-seeing eyes, and I didn’t see a damned thing I wasn’t supposed to…But to be able to manifest that strongly, to walk around like one of us, or rather two of us, Lissa and Old Tom…there must be something in this theatre, some unusual source of power, to make these ghosts so much stronger than they had any right to be.”

The lights dimmed suddenly all across the stage. Dark shadows gathered. And then a single spotlight stabbed down from above, marking out one small part of the stage in a circle of shimmering light. And from out of the darkness and into the spotlight walked the ghost girl, Kim. She took up her position in the pool of brilliant light, standing tall and proud and serene, and smiled dazzlingly at everyone. She looked exactly the same as she had before, dressed in exactly the same way as when she’d been murdered, down in Oxford Circus Tube Station…when JC first met her. He started toward her, then made himself stop. He looked fiercely at the others.

“You can all see her this time?”

“Certainly looks like her,” said Happy. “But…I’m not getting anything from her, JC. I can’t even sense her presence, never mind her personality. And normally, she blazes in my mind like a balefire at midnight. Are you sure this isn’t another illusion?”

“You haven’t been picking up much of anything recently, Happy,” said JC, not unkindly.

“Don’t think I hadn’t noticed,” growled Happy. “Something, or more probably Someone, has been deliberately blocking me. And so thoroughly, and so subtly, I didn’t even notice. Until now. After what happened here, I thought it was Alistair Gravel who’d been misdirecting me with his scary visions, so I wouldn’t see through the Old Tom disguise he was wearing…but now I’m not so sure. This Faust you met, Melody; how long has he been here? How much of what we’ve seen and experienced could be down to him? And if he can make things, physical things like the Phantom, then maybe…”

“That looks like our Kim,” said Melody. “But why isn’t she saying anything? Normally, you can’t shut her up.”

“Could Alistair Gravel be behind her?” said Happy.

“How would he know about her?” said Melody.

“He’s dead!” said Happy. “The dead know all kinds of things they’re not supposed to!”

“Or maybe, just maybe, she really is my guardian-angel ghost,” said JC. “Come to save us all in our hour of need.”

He moved slowly forward, his footsteps loud and clear and echoing on the open stage. Kim smiled happily at him but made no move to leave the spotlight and come to him. JC stopped, carefully, right at the edge of the shimmering light. It was her face, every detail exactly right. He should know. He’d spent enough time staring at it. He spoke softly to Kim, doing his best to be persuasive without pressuring her.

“Why are you here, Kim? Can you tell me? Can you tell me anything? Something, anything, so I can be sure this is you.”

But she looked at him, smiling sadly, her eyes fixed on his, saying nothing. JC reached out a hand to her, and Kim immediately fell back a step. Her smile disappeared, and she looked at him warningly, admonishingly. JC stayed where he was. He wanted it to be her. Needed it to be her. But he didn’t trust anything in the Haybarn Theatre any more. Not even himself. He raised a hand to his sunglasses, to take them off and look at her directly with his altered eyes, then he stopped and spun round as the swing doors at the back of the auditorium smashed open, and the Phantom of the Haybarn came crashing through them.

Everyone turned to look. Both swing doors were blasted right off their hinges, thrown away to either side, by the sheer force of the Phantom’s arrival. He struck a pose in front of the great dark gap he’d made, letting everyone on the stage get a good look at him. Stooped, half-crouching like an animal, resplendent in Victorian finery and a night-dark opera cape with blood-red lining. He should have looked like a gentleman, like a civilised man from a civilised time; instead he looked more like some creature from the wild places, a beast that had been raised up to walk like a man but left none of its savagery behind. Murder was in his every move, death in his smile, horror in his rotting half-face and grubby half-mask. He laughed silently at them all, like some terrible predator from the jungle night.

“Told you,” said Melody. “The Phantom of the Haybarn.”

“Okay,” said Happy. “That is seriously ugly, with a really big side order of disgusting and distressing. But I have to say, although I’m quite definitely sensing its presence, I’m not picking up any thoughts from it. As such. That’s not a person. More like a projection from some other mind, further away.”

Melody said, “It’s a creation of the Faust. He made it. Right there in front of me. It’s bits of flesh, shaped by his will and intent.”

“Flesh?” said Happy. “Oh ick.”

“Not an actual creation, then,” said JC. “Not a living thing. Good to know this Faust has his limits.”

“It’s still butt ugly,” sniffed Happy.

“Go on,” said Melody. “I’m pretty sure it can hear you. Go ahead and annoy the insanely powerful murderous creature, why don’t you?”

“Shutting up now,” said Happy. “And hiding behind you until further notice.”

“I don’t think that…thing, that Phantom, is anything to do with the games Alistair has been playing,” said Benjamin.

“Of course not,” said Elizabeth. “Alistair had more style. Not to mention taste. His imagination was never that…grubby.”

“You never put on a production of The Phantom of the Opera?” said JC. “Nothing this creature could have been derived from?”

“Oh please,” said Elizabeth, crushingly. “We were theatre people, not music-hall.”

“Snob,” said Benjamin fondly.

“So this is nothing to do with our dead actor and his twenty-year-old grudge,” said JC. “This isn’t about you; this is about us. An old enemy of ours has followed us here.” He smiled slowly, and it was not a good smile. “The Faust is really nothing more than a party crasher; and it’s up to us to give him the boot. I say first we take down this second-rate Phantom, then we go find the Faust and kick his nasty arse until he agrees to tell us things we need to know.”

“Sounds good to me, boss,” said Happy, from behind Melody. “You go right ahead and get all violent on the dangerous psychopath in the cape. I’ll watch your back. From a distance.”

“We have to make the Faust talk,” said JC with a cold and deliberate patience. “He knows the truth about Kim. Where she’s been, what’s happened to her. You think it’s a coincidence she showed up here the same time as him?”

They all looked at Kim, standing still and silent in her spotlight. Like a ghost impaled on a shimmering pin. She looked only at JC, with calm, steady eyes. As though she was waiting for something.

“Is there anything you can do to help us, Kim?” said JC. “No. Then you stay here while I go have words with the Phantom.”

“Some guardian-angel ghost,” muttered Happy.

“I heard that!” said JC.

The Phantom came tearing through the auditorium towards the stage. He didn’t bother with the open aisle down the middle; instead, he tore a path right through the ranked rows of seats, in a casual, brutal display of strength. Insanely powerful, he smashed through the bolted-down seats as though they were made of paper, throwing broken pieces aside. The impacts didn’t slow him, and he took no obvious pain or damage. He hit the chairs like a runner breasting an endless series of tapes, his arms flailing wildly. The savage sounds of destruction echoed through the vast auditorium, bouncing back from the walls, the sounds of something destroying everything in its path because it couldn’t be bothered to go around.

“Show-off!” JC said loudly, to make it clear that he wasn’t in any way impressed. He looked down his nose at the rapidly approaching creature and suddenly smiled. “Everyone knows how to stop the Phantom of the Opera…”

He strode right up to the edge of the stage and stepped off without slowing. He landed easily then stood there and waited for the Phantom to come to him. He even smiled and nodded and made encouraging gestures to the creature to hurry it up. The Phantom snarled at him, his eyes glowing yellow as urine in the gloom of the auditorium. He finally smashed through the last row of seats, and slammed to a halt right in front of JC. Stooped by a curved back, half-crouched like an animal ready to spring but not even breathing hard, for all his exertions. He smiled a horrid smile, with no humour in it, no human emotion at all, and held up his gloved hands, so JC could see the splintered claws that had thrust through the ends of the fingertips. JC sniffed loudly.

“Am I supposed to be impressed? I’ve crapped scarier-looking objects than you.”

The Phantom lunged forward, clawed hands raised. JC stepped forward at the very last moment and tore off the Phantom’s mask. It clung stickily for a moment, then ripped away in his hand. The Phantom stopped dead. But instead of revealing the expected disfigured face, which the Phantom of the Opera would have immediately stopped to hide…there was nothing there. Nothing at all behind the grubby half-mask. The left side of the Phantom’s head was…missing. The right half of the face and head ended abruptly in a twisted mess of gnarled and fused tissues. One glowing yellow eye, a nose bisected right down the middle, and half a mouth, still smiling its nasty smile. Up close, the half-face smelled of rotting meat.

JC felt something move in his hand. He looked down. The half-mask still had a yellow eye in it, looking up at him through its hole, glaring madly. The mask itself felt like skin, like flesh, in his hand, living materials moulded into shape by the Faust’s will. It pulsed in his grasp. JC wanted to grimace with disgust, but he couldn’t allow himself to show weakness. He crushed the mask in his grasp, then whipped off his sunglasses with his other hand, to give the Phantom the full benefit of his unearthly glare. The Phantom flinched and turned his half-face away from the golden glow, but he didn’t fall back by so much as a step. Instead, he slowly turned his half-face back, to match the glowing glare with his own inhuman gaze. And then he took one slow deliberate step towards JC.

“Happy!” JC said loudly. “Really could use a little assistance down here!”

Happy came forward to the edge of the stage, looked down at the drop, and the Phantom, and hesitated. Melody came up behind him and pushed him off. Happy let out a loud cry and landed in a heap beside JC. He quickly scrambled back onto his feet, checked quickly to make sure everything was undamaged, then moved reluctantly forward to stand beside JC. Because once you’d been thrown in the deep end, you might as well go kick the snot out of the sharks. Happy was always quite prepared to be brave—once it was clear there was no other alternative. He hit the Phantom with his hardest, strongest blast of telepathic disbelief. The Phantom slammed to a halt as though he’d hit a brick wall. JC glared his golden glare. Happy concentrated on his disbelief till he felt that his head would burst open. The Phantom opened his mouth to say something, then fell apart. Unable to hold himself together in the face of such focused opposition.

The night-black cape dropped off his shoulders, running away like some thick, inky liquid. The legs collapsed, and the arms fell off. The squirming trunk hit the floor hard and fell in upon itself, melting down and running away in thick rivulets. The clothes dissolved along with the body, as though they were all part of the same thing. It slumped down like a melting candle, then dissipated into thick white mists that quickly disappeared on the still air. The half-face was the last to go, lying in a white pool on the floor, still glaring silently and malevolently up at JC and Happy, the mouth still working right till the very end, when it disappeared suddenly, like a bad dream.

JC felt something squirm in his hand. He looked down to find that the mask had become a thick sticky liquid, dripping through his closed fingers. He opened his hand and shook the stuff away. JC pulled a face and rubbed his hand clean on the back of Happy’s jacket. Happy knew better than to say anything. They both studied the floor carefully, but there wasn’t even a stain left to mark the Phantom’s passing.

“What was that?” said Happy.

“Get back up here!” Melody said sharply, from the stage.

JC and Happy turned and raced around to the steps that led back up to the stage. JC got there first, by a short head, then the two of them ran out onto the stage and looked to where everyone else was looking. Another Door had appeared, at the far side of the stage; a trap-Door, full of darkness. JC looked quickly at Benjamin and Elizabeth, but they were already shaking their heads.

“Hasn’t been a trap-door in this stage for decades,” said Benjamin.

“Not since that nasty business with the Panto Dame,” said Elizabeth.

And then they all cried out and turned their heads away for a moment as a blindingly bright light blazed up out of the trap-Door, like a spotlight in reverse. There was nothing shimmering about this one; it was a stark and brutal light, harsh and unforgiving, casting deep dark shadows all around it. And then the Faust rose majestically through the opening, accompanied by the singing of a heavenly choir and the sound of massed bugles. The Faust rose smoothly, as though riding an elevator, standing tall and proud and erect, until he was a good foot or more above the open trap-Door. And it became clear that he was standing on nothing. He smiled happily about him, like some visiting dignitary bestowing his grace on the unworthy, and stepped lightly down onto the stage. The brilliant light snapped off, leaving everyone else blinking for a moment. The heavenly choir and the massed bugles shut down in mid phrase. The Faust beamed about him.

“If you’re going to make an entrance, make an entrance! That’s what I always say. I am the Faust, and I’ll be your murderer tonight. I do hope nobody’s going to be bothersome…That small thing you destroyed was only flesh, after all. Nothing more. And I’ve been given dominion over all such things by my lord and master, The Flesh Undying. Ah me; I do so love to see the look on people’s faces when they hear his glorious name. And know that all hope is gone, the game is over, and the sentence is death. Because that is, after all, the only fitting fate for his enemies.”

“You were right,” JC said to Melody. “He does like to talk, doesn’t he?”

Benjamin and Elizabeth looked at the Faust. Anywhen else, they’d probably have been impressed. But after everything they’d been through and experienced so far, he was merely another unpleasant visitation. They looked to the Ghost Finders for some sort of explanation, in a not-terribly-hopeful way.

“Long story,” Melody said briskly. “And you really wouldn’t want to know, anyway. Settle for knowing that this completely up-himself personage is the only really dangerous thing in this theatre.”

“How very harsh,” murmured the Faust. “Frankly, I’d expected a better class of dialogue, in the theatre.”

JC, Happy, and Melody stepped forward to confront the Faust. Benjamin and Elizabeth backed off a little and let them do it. They knew when they were way out of their depth. JC took another step forward, and the Faust came forward to meet him. They circled each other, like two tigers meeting in a clearing. Two powerful, arrogant beings who had more in common than either of them would ever have admitted.

“What are you?” said JC.

“I am what I’ve made of myself,” said the Faust. “Can you say the same? I doubt it. What are you, Mr. Chance, except another overworked and underpaid civil servant, working for a government department…never knowing what’s really going on behind the scenes.”

JC smiled. “You really don’t know me, do you?”

“I chose my master!” said the Faust. “I gave myself to The Flesh Undying. Like the man said, we all have to serve someone. Whom do you serve, really? A Boss? A cause? Or are you only another pitiful little functionary, doing a job to fill in all those long, dreary hours till you die? I have given my life to something greater.”

“You gave it to a monster,” said JC. “Something that only came here because it was kicked out of its own dimension. It fell through a hole in the sky like a lump of shit because its own kind couldn’t stand to have it around any longer. It doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t care about anything. It’ll tear this whole world apart to get home again.”

“What do I care?” said the Faust. “As long as he takes me with him. I never cared much for this world, anyway. Certainly it never cared much for me. And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, the secret origin of the Faust! Death and damnation to all the world, and everyone in it, because they didn’t love me the way they should have! That’ll show them. I have been given command over flesh. The new flesh, the bad flesh—I can summon anything through my Door and mould it to my will and need. Call up any shape and form and throw it at my master’s enemies.”

“You may have the flesh,” said JC, stopping his circling abruptly, so the Faust had to stop, too. JC gave him his best confident grin. “Hell with the flesh; I have the spirit at my command. Meet my secret weapon.” He stepped back and gestured at Kim, still watching from her spotlight. “Meet my very own guardian-angel ghost! Get him, Kim!”

“Sorry,” said the Faust. “But that’s not her.”

He snapped his fingers, and the shimmering spotlight blinked out. Kim smiled and shrugged briefly at JC, then slumped forward into a melting mass, like a candle in an oven. She collapsed into a pool of sticky white flesh that drained away through the cracks in the stage floor-boards; then she was gone.

JC swayed sickly on his feet, as though he’d been hit. His heart lurched in his chest, and he had to fight to get his breath. He tried to say something and couldn’t. He’d been so sure it was her, come back to him at last, to save him as he’d saved her, down in the Underground. He’d believed in her because he needed it to be her. But it wasn’t her, never had been her, not his Kim. He stared at the place where she’d been, then slowly turned his head to look at the Faust. And a wiser man would have been very careful about what he said next.

“Another of my little tricks,” the Faust said easily. “I sent her to you, to keep an eye on you. To take you where I wanted you to go, to lead you around by the nose and mess with your head, for the fun of it. Some say the greatest trick God ever pulled was to make us believe love is real. It does make people like you so much easier to manipulate.”

“You bastard,” said JC. “You bastard.”

Melody looked uneasily at JC, then raised her voice to attract the Faust’s attention. “So that was you at the railway station as well?”

The Faust looked at her. “What? What railway station? Can we stick to the point, please?”

“You see?” Melody said to JC. “He doesn’t know anything about a railway station. So what we saw there…”

“Yes,” said JC, straightening up and squaring his shoulders again. “I see.” He looked steadily at the Faust. “I saw Kim at that railway station. So she…was nothing to do with you. Which means, if nothing else, that you’re not nearly as knowledgeable as you claim to be.”

The Faust shrugged briskly. “It doesn’t make any difference. You are alone and powerless before me. Exactly the way I like it.”

“Actually, no,” said JC. “I have more than enough spirit to throw at you.” He turned his back on the Faust and beamed at the others. “Getting to the heart of this haunting has been like peeling an onion. Every time you peel off a layer, you find there’s another underneath. Nearly everything we’ve seen and encountered here has been part of one big extravagant show. But the time for distractions is over. Unless you want to see your beloved theatre destroyed…Step forward and take a bow, Alistair Gravel!”

There was a pause, then the sound of loud, heavy footsteps emerged from the wings and advanced a short distance across the stage, with no-one making them. They were followed by a crawling dead man, bloody and ruined, dragging himself across the stage by his broken fingers. A young Benjamin and a young Elizabeth emerged from the wings after him, strolling happily forward, arm in arm. Followed by a smiling Lissa and a quietly grinning Old Tom, the caretaker. They all stood together in a group, ignoring the dumbfounded Faust and nodding easily to Benjamin and Elizabeth and the Ghost Finders. The crawling dead man rose abruptly to his feet, popped his dangling eye back into his socket, and stood calmly with the others. And then they all stepped forward as one and took a deep bow. The performance was at an end. They straightened up, grinned briefly, and disappeared, all of them at once, like blown-out candles. And from out of the wings strode one young man in his twenties, with a very familiar face. He grinned easily about him and took a quick bow of his own.

Alistair Gravel.

“It was him, all along?” said Happy. “He was…all of them?”

“It was him,” said JC. “It was always him.”

“Even Lissa?” said Melody.

“Yes,” said JC. “I have something to discuss with Alistair Gravel, about that.”

“Why?” Happy said immediately. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened,” said JC, firmly.

Benjamin and Elizabeth stared at Alistair. They didn’t seem scared, or even upset. Slowly, they smiled and relaxed, pleased to see an old friend again, after too long apart. Elizabeth sniffed back tears and wrung her hands together, while Benjamin put a supporting arm across her shoulders. He looked…as though a great weight had finally been lifted off him.

“Oh please,” said Elizabeth. “Please let it be him. Let it really be him.”

“It is,” said Benjamin. “I can tell. Can’t you tell?”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth. “Oh yes…”

“It’s me,” said Alistair Gravel. “And I am so very happy to see you both again, Benjamin and Elizabeth.”

The two actors hurried toward him, and Alistair strode forward to meet them. They came together in the middle of the stage and threw their arms around each other and hugged each other tightly. Three old friends who hadn’t seen each other in twenty years, separated by far more than years and time. There were a few tears, and some laughter, then they all stood back and looked at each other as though they could never get enough.

“You look the same, Alistair,” said Elizabeth. “You haven’t changed at all! Oh, don’t look at me, Alistair. I’ve changed so much.”

“Not in any way that matters,” said Alistair. “Nothing else matters except that we’re together again.”

“I’ve missed you so much,” said Benjamin. “We both have…”

“And I’ve missed you,” said the ghost. “That’s why I brought you back here. For one last performance.” He looked across at the fascinated Ghost Finders and grinned broadly. “‘All the world’s a stage…and one man in his time plays many parts…’ Why should death be any different?”

“So everyone we met here was you?” said Elizabeth.

“All of me,” said Alistair. “Everyone you’ve seen, and everything you’ve been through, has been down to me. In one guise or another. Until Little Miss Faust here turned up and started interfering.” He stuck his tongue out at the Faust, then turned to smile winningly at JC. “The whole costumes thing was down to him. Including the appearance of your ghost girl. Which is why I couldn’t see her; he was working directly on your mind. I did rescue you, as Lissa and Old Tom.”

“Yes,” said JC. “You came on to me as Lissa!”

“I knew it!” said Happy.

“Shut up, Happy,” said JC. “Nothing happened.”

“Alistair always was very…promiscuous,” said Elizabeth, and Benjamin nodded solemnly. Alistair beamed on both of them.

“This whole show was for your benefit, my dears. I wanted to prove to you…what a great actor I was. Far more talented than that conceited movie star, bad cess to his name. He ruined your play. I hope you told everybody about his toupee…Good. I brought you back here so I could have a little fun with you, and to say good-bye, properly. Because we never got the chance. But the performance is over now. Ring down the curtains and get on with your lives. Go ahead with your play. All is forgiven. I always said…it was a bloody good play.”

“So there was never any real threat here?” said JC. “Never any real danger, to anyone?”

“Of course not,” said Alistair. “It was all me, putting on a show. Oh, it’s been so much fun, my dears, to have an audience again!”

“But why go to such lengths, to create things to scare the crap out of us?” said Benjamin.

“Because I owed you both a good scare, like the one you gave me,” said Alistair. “And, perhaps, a little punishment. But it was all perfectly harmless scars. Think of it as a good old-fashioned ghost-train ride. I always loved those…”

“Oh bloody hell, not another one,” muttered Happy.

“Hold everything,” said Melody. “What about the dead homeless guy?”

“What about him?” said Alistair. “He broke in one evening and died of a heart attack in his sleep. Nothing to do with me.”

“Excuse me!” said the Faust, very loudly. “Will you all please shut the hell up and pay attention to me!” He glared around at them all until he was sure he’d got everyone’s attention again. “Do you really think I give a damn about some twenty-year-old sob story and some half-arsed ghost who can’t take a hint and piss off to the afterworlds where he belongs? Life is for the living, and the flesh is all that matters.”

Happy smirked at Melody. “He’s talking to you.”

“What? Him? That scrawny piece of shit in the off-the-peg suit?” said Melody. “Look at the state of him—no two pounds of the man hanging straight. I’d rather sleep with the dummy the suit came from. He couldn’t keep up with me, anyway…”

“Not many can,” said Happy.

“This is true,” said Melody. “Now stop fishing for compliments.”

“You’ll have to excuse them,” JC said to the increasingly frustrated Faust. “They’re just being themselves. But they do have a point. For all your fine words, what can you hope to do against trained operatives like us? We only had to give your Phantom thing a hard look, and it fell apart on us.”

“The Phantom of the Haybarn was only a bit of fun,” said the Faust. “Now it’s time to get serious. The best way to overcome an enemy is to make them a part of you. Even if you’re clearly not worthy…So, I’m going to eat you all up with spoons.”

He gestured languidly at the trap-Door, lying forgotten on the other side of the stage, and a great fountain of corpse white flesh erupted up out of the dark opening. It reached almost to the high ceiling—a tower of pulsing, expanding and contracting flesh…before finally falling back again to slap onto the stage and spread out in a great pulsating pool. It moved slowly but inexorably across the stage towards the actors and the Ghost Finders, in sudden spurts and rushes. More and more of the stuff burst up out of the trap-Door, spilling out in all directions, forming a thick carpet of flesh on the stage. It rose and pressed forward like a slow-motion wave, throwing out sudden extremities, straining hungrily out for prey. Flesh, without form or limit, called up by the Faust and driven on by his will: an endless supply of living tissue, come to eat up everything set before it and make them a part of it.

JC had frozen in place like all the others, but he broke the spell first and gestured quickly for everyone else to back away from the advancing, hungry tide. But they’d barely started moving before more of the shapeless mass burst out of the other wings, spilling across the stage towards them. More welled out from behind the drawn curtains at the back of the stage, and a sudden white wave leapt up over the front of the stage. The actors and Ghost Finders pressed close together, surrounded on all sides by a slow-moving sea of hungry flesh. It boiled and seethed, rising and falling in sudden surges; and as it drew nearer, JC could see narrow traceries of blue veins in the white material. It was alive in its own way. JC didn’t need to ask the Faust what this stuff would do when it finally reached its prey. He could feel its hunger pulsing on the air. It was here to swallow them all up, render them down, and absorb every last bit of them into itself.

Flesh at its most basic, all appetite and menace, here to serve The Flesh Undying.

Alistair Gravel lifted his ghostly feet and sat cross-legged in mid air, perfectly poised, looking down at the flesh moving jerkily below him with a curled lip of cold distaste. The flesh ignored him. Perhaps because it could tell he wasn’t real, that he had no physical presence to absorb.

Happy glared about him, scowling at the gleaming, pulsing mass. “Okay. This is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been around.”

“Are you picking up anything, from this…stuff?” said JC, looking quickly about him for anything that might serve as an exit and not finding one.

“Yes,” said Happy. “It’s not an illusion. Unfortunately. It’s really physically here even though I do wish ever so much that it wasn’t. It’s alive, and it’s hungry. Don’t let even the smallest part of it touch you.”

“Way ahead of you there,” said Melody.

“It’s like that movie, with Steve McQueen,” said Elizabeth, clinging tightly to Benjamin while trying hard to sound brave.

“Hush, dear,” said Benjamin. “You’re showing your age.”

“Oh come on, darling. Who remembers anything about that awful remake? Benjamin, it really is getting awfully close…”

“Stay close to me, love. Stick close to me.”

By now, they’d all been herded together in the middle of the stage while the flesh urged slowly forward on all sides at once. It was almost half a foot deep, and growing taller and thicker all the time, as more and more of the sickening stuff burst up out of the trap-Door. It advanced in sudden leaps and spurts, throwing up into the air sticky projections, projections that fell back to be absorbed and vanish into the main mass. The flesh oozed straight past the Faust without touching or bothering him, and he smiled happily at his victims, huddled together before him.

Benjamin looked urgently at JC over Elizabeth’s shoulder as she hid her face against his chest. “You and Happy destroyed the Phantom! You’re the professionals here! Can’t you do anything?”

“I am,” said JC. “I’m thinking.”

“What?” said Benjamin. “You’re thinking?”

“Yes,” said JC. “The Phantom was flesh but a small thing. There doesn’t seem to be any end to this…”

“Where’s it all coming from?” said Happy.

“From The Flesh Undying, I assume,” said JC. “Directly or indirectly. It would appear the name is more literally descriptive than we realised. I’d been hoping it was a metaphor…Still, spirit trumps flesh every time. Because flesh begins and ends in life, while spirit transcends life…So, to counter this much flesh, we need more spirits. Logic. Alistair Gravel! Come on down! This is your theatre, your place of power. We need a helping hand here, and you need to put a stop to this unwelcome intrusion. If you really have forgiven your friends, and don’t want them to die…”

“Of course I don’t!” said Alistair. “But what can I do?”

“We need spirits, darling!” Elizabeth said, turning away from Benjamin without leaving his arms to stare desperately at Alistair. “Spirits like you, to throw against this awful Faust person. Can you oblige?”

“Glad to,” said Alistair. “Sorry if I’m a bit slow, my dears, but this is all new to me. And rather more than one poor ghost can handle. Fortunately, I’m not alone here.” He lowered his legs to stand on the stage, right in the middle of the fleshy sea. The pulsing white mass cringed back from him, repulsed by his very nature. Alistair sneered at the Faust. “How do you think I achieved all my many illusions, and manifestations? My power comes from the theatre: a place of dreams and dramas, created by the living to be timeless. So that the Past and the Present and the Future could always be with us. Visions and fantasies become eternal truths, on this stage. History becomes legend; ordinary men and women become immortal. The Haybarn is full of the spirits of performances long past and audiences long gone. They’re all still here, in spirit, because they loved this place too much to ever leave it completely.

“So rise up, dear friends! Let us fill the stalls with our English dead, and drive out this soulless, heartless wretch and the mess he’s made of our glorious stage! Rise up, you players all! ‘The play’s the thing!’”

Suddenly, the whole stage was full of costumed men and women. Packed from front to back and wing to wing. With lords and ladies, character roles and spear-carriers, and every actor who ever created magic for an audience…with words and gestures and perhaps a knowing look. Whole armies from Shakespeare, crowds of comic actors and proud tragedians, uncounted heroes and villains, and any number of attendant lords proud to swell a scene. Drawn back to the stage, by the pride and glory of their ancient profession, to set their great hearts and hard-learned lessons against the simple, spiteful malice of the Faust.

Great in spirit, no matter how small they may have been in life, because deep down every one of them knew that everything they did on the stage was not for them but for their audiences.

And there they were, too, all the audiences that ever were, countless bodies filling the ranked rows of seats in the vast auditorium. A sea of faces, come in celebration of the magic they saw made before them every night, of the lifting of the spirit and the awakening of the heart, that the actors made possible. Come to stand against the empty heart of the Faust.

Actors stood together on the stage, row upon row and rank upon rank, packed so tightly they overlapped each other. And together, they advanced upon the Faust. The audience stood up, as one, and charged the stage, rushing forward in a great tide. The dead actors and the dead audiences fell upon the Faust, and all his vicious flesh was no match for their spirits.

The glistening sea of flesh withered at their touch, unable to cope with so much spirit in one place. It fell back from them, dissipating and disappearing, surging back to the trap-Door. In moments, it was all gone. The ghosts swarmed past Benjamin and Elizabeth and the Ghost Finders, not even seeing them, all their attention focused on the Faust. Benjamin and Elizabeth looked on, wide-eyed and wondering, recognising a face here and there. Even though the ghosts didn’t see them. They were not here for the living. The ghostly actors and audiences surrounded the Faust, circling him, round and round and round; while he turned his face away, this way and that, crying out…faced with something beyond his powers and his experience. All he knew was the selfishness of flesh. All the arrogance and confidence had been beaten out of him, and he had nothing to replace them with.

Alistair Gravel came forward, and an aisle opened up before him so that he could walk unhurriedly through the army of ghosts he’d called up, to confront the Faust. Alistair came forward, and the Faust spun around to face him, confused and half-mad. The two men stared at each other—the dead man not yet departed and the living man who’d only thought himself so much more.

“There’s more to life than flesh,” Alistair said finally. “Here, in this theatre, generations of actors and audiences have celebrated all the glories of the human heart and soul. Monday to Friday, twice on Saturdays. The theatre celebrates all the things…that life is for. The things more important than life, that make being human worthwhile. The great Dream of Humanity. What is flesh in the face of that?”

“Don’t get cocky, little ghost,” said the Faust, breathless with shock, glaring desperately about him. “There’s more to power than sheer strength of numbers. All of you together are no match for me! I’m the Faust! I’m not just flesh; I am the force that gives flesh form and meaning and appetite. I’m alive; and you’re dead!”

“And that…is why it will take both body and spirit, the living and the dead working together, to stop you,” said Kim Sterling, the ghost girl.

They all looked round at the unexpected voice, and another aisle opened up among the massed spirits on the stage so that Kim could walk through them, to stand before JC. She smiled at him, and, after a moment, JC smiled back at her.

“You always did know how to make an entrance, Kim.”

“Hello, love,” said Kim. “Miss me?”

“You know I did,” said JC. “I almost died without you. Where have you been, all this time? That was you, at the railway station, wasn’t it?”

“Of course,” said Kim. “You didn’t think I’d leave, walk off and abandon you, did you? But answers will have to wait. There is business to be done here. The Faust must be dealt with. Nasty little thing that he is. We have to do this together, JC. Your flesh and my spirit against the simple brutal thing that is the Faust. Are you ready, my love?”

“Always,” said JC.

“Brace yourself,” said Kim.

She walked forward, into JC’s body, until she overlapped him completely, combining her ghostly self with his physical form. Joining the two of them together, into a whole far more than the sum of its parts. JC cried out, in shock and pain and awe, as his whole body glowed with the same golden glare as his eyes. And both the living and the dead had to turn their faces aside, away from that blinding, brilliant, otherworldly light.

JC and Kim advanced on the Faust, and the ghosts fell back as something moved through them, shining like a star fallen to the earth. The Faust cried out. He couldn’t look away, couldn’t back away, held where he was by the power in that light. JC and Kim stopped, right before the Faust, and dropped one heavy hand onto his shoulder. And the Faust cried out again, in agony and horror, as his whole body shook and shattered under that unbearable touch.

He crumbled and fell apart, collapsing in upon himself like the artificial construct he was, like a statue struck by a hundred hammers. He fell into pieces, which melted and ran away, dissipating into streaky mists that hung heavily on the still air, before reluctantly disappearing. His face hung on stubbornly, hanging together on the top of the pile till the very last, through some awful act of will, his glaring eyes fixed on JC and Kim. When he spoke, at the last, his voice seemed to come from far and far-away.

“I won’t go,” he said. “I can’t go, not yet. Not till I’ve had my say. One last chance to strike at you, JC, and hurt you. I have enough strength left for that.”

“Stamp on him, JC,” said Happy. “Shut the bastard up. He doesn’t have anything to say that you need to hear.”

“No,” said JC and Kim, with both their voices. “He knows things.”

“I didn’t sell my soul for power,” said the Faust’s face, already drifting away at the edges. “I sold my body to be free from the limitations of the flesh, and of the spirit. For a better soul, not trapped within the body. Already my master is calling me away, to a place where you can’t reach me. Where he will set me up again, as something new and even more powerful. The new flesh, the bad flesh. You’ll see! Oh, don’t look so disappointed, JC. We’ll meet again. After all, we have so much in common. Because you’re no more real than I am!”

“What are you talking about?” said JC.

“You haven’t been real since the Outside reached down and touched you in the Underground! Don’t you get it, JC? You died down there, on that demon train; and the Outside brought you back!”

“Why?” said JC and Kim. “Why would it do that?”

“For its own purposes, of course. That’s why you can love a ghost girl when most living men can’t stand to be around them. That’s why you can hold her within you now, and use her power, to do this to me! That’s why you were drawn together…That’s why…”

His voice trailed away, his gaze fixed on something only he could see. And a look of utter horror passed over his crumbling face. When he spoke again his voice was full of shock and panic, and a terrible, agonised betrayal.

“No! No, Master! You promised me! You promised me…”

His voice broke into a heart-rending scream of loss and deception; and then his face collapsed into undifferentiated flesh, melting and running away into the open trap-Door, which swallowed him up, slammed shut after him, and disappeared. Kim stepped forward, out of JC, and for a long moment they both looked at where the trap-Door had been before they turned to look at each other.

“Do you believe him?” said Kim.

“I don’t know,” said JC. “I don’t know what to believe. Does it matter?”

“We found each other,” said Kim. “Living or dead, nothing else will ever matter as much.”

“Hello,” said Happy. “Where’s everybody gone?”

Everyone looked around them. The ghosts were gone, all the actors and their audiences, returned to their rest. The stage was empty, the auditorium full of broken chairs again. Happy and Melody stood together, and Benjamin and Elizabeth stood very close together. Alistair Gravel stood to one side, studying JC and Kim thoughtfully.

“I declare this case officially closed,” said JC. “The Haunting of the Haybarn Theatre is over. If that’s all right with you, Alistair?”

“Oh yes. Certainly!” said Alistair. “Job done as far as I’m concerned.”

JC smiled fondly at Kim. “My guardian-angel ghost. Always arriving just in the nick of time.”

“I can’t stay, JC,” said Kim.

“What? Why not?” said JC. “You have to! Or do they…Does someone still have a hold over you?”

“No,” said Kim. “They never did. They never had me, JC. I had to disappear, but I can’t tell you why. Not yet. I saw something, then, and…Come after me, JC. Come and find me. And when you do, all will become clear. The real job, the real mission, isn’t over yet. Come find me, JC. I’ll be waiting for you.”

She placed one ghostly hand against his cheek; and he could almost feel it, like a cool breeze passing by. But by the time he’d raised a hand to place over hers, she was already gone. Disappeared in a moment, as though she had never been there. JC nodded slowly, at some hidden thought, or decision, then he turned away and walked back across the stage, to join the others.

“You can’t believe anything the Faust said,” said Happy. “The Devil always lies.”

“Except when a truth can hurt you more,” said Melody.

“Really not helping here,” murmured Happy.

“I’m not dead,” said JC. “I’m not. I’d know.”

“There’s all kinds of tests I could run,” offered Melody.

“I don’t think so,” said JC. “I think…we’re in unknown territory, here.” He started to raise one hand to his sunglasses, then stopped himself. He smiled, briefly. “I breathe, I have a pulse, I’m solid; I still get up in the middle of the night to take a pee…That’s real enough for me.”

“The Faust didn’t actually say you were dead,” Happy said carefully. “He said…you might have been, but the Outside brought you back. To life. Think of it as a Really Near Death Experience.”

“Brought back, to serve its purposes,” said JC. “Nothing at all to worry about there.”

“Maybe it knew about The Flesh Undying,” said Melody. “Maybe it needed some powerful agent of its own, in this world, to fight it.”

“And it chose you!” said Happy. “Could have been worse. Could have been me.”

“Kim has all the answers,” JC said firmly. “We have to find her.”

“Of course we will,” said Melody. “We’re the Ghost Finders.”

“Tally-ho,” said Happy.

“Excuse me,” said Benjamin. “But are we supposed to understand any of that?”

“No,” said JC. “Don’t worry about any of it. If you like sleeping at nights.”

“I thought not,” said Elizabeth.

The two actors moved away from the Ghost Finders, to talk with Alistair Gravel. They hugged each other again—not like old friends meeting, more like saying good-bye.

“It’s been so good, to see you again,” said Elizabeth.

“You know I never meant to hurt you, Alistair,” said Benjamin.

“Of course I know,” said Alistair. “I’ve always known.”

“Then why did you wait so long, to call us back?” said Elizabeth.

“It’s not easy, being a ghost,” said Alistair. “It took me years to raise the power to do the job properly. My return had to be…dramatic. As was my death.”

“You always were an old ham,” said Benjamin.

“What do you mean—old?” said Alistair.

They laughed lightly together. Three friends again.

“Go on with your show,” said Alistair. “And I’ll go on…to the bigger show that’s waiting.”

Elizabeth looked at him searchingly. “You can see it?”

“I seem…to sense it,” said Alistair. “Okay, that’s it. No more hanging around. I’m off. Break a leg, my dears.”

“Do you want your body buried properly?” said Benjamin.

“No,” said Alistair. “Leave me where I am. Where I’ve always felt I belonged.”

He turned away and disappeared, like a turned-off light. Gone, finally. They could all feel the difference in the atmosphere: like an actor who’s finished his last scene and walked off stage.

They walked back through the auditorium. Up the central aisle, surrounded by broken chairs and shattered rows, courtesy of the Phantom of the Haybarn. Benjamin and Elizabeth were already quietly discussing how the hell they were going to sell this to the insurance people. The whole place seemed quiet, calm, at peace with itself.

When they arrived at the great gap where the swing doors had been, JC hung back, to let the others go through ahead of him. He stopped, to look back at the stage. And there, in a single spotlight from nowhere at all, the Lady in White and the Headless Panto Dame were waltzing silently together.

Because the show, the great Dream of Humanity, must always go on.