Simon Green: Ghost of a Dream

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.