In the next poster, the four young men toasted Melody with glasses half-full of fresh and foaming blood. There were dark crimson stains on the rims of the glasses and around the mouths of the fine young men. Their skin was the colourless pallor of the grave, and their eyes were dark and knowing. Thin, dead lips had pulled back in a rictus, revealing razor-sharp shark’s teeth. Patches of grave mould showed clearly on the formal clothes they’d been buried in. The fingers wrapped around the fine glasses were broken and split, from where they’d had to claw through their coffin lids to get out.
In the fourth portrait, the woman in the butter yellow dress was still standing in her doorway, but now the door had been thrown wide open, and the dress was soaked in blood because the woman didn’t have a head any more. Someone had ripped it right off. Blood had coursed down from the ragged stump, down the whole length of her dress, plastering it to her body with ghastly red stains. More blood had splashed across the open door, coating it from top to bottom. The woman stood where she was, in the exact same pose, as though she hadn’t yet understood the terrible thing that had happened to her.
The fifth poster was the same wintry scene as before; but now the dark figure was running down the narrow lane towards her. Already it had covered half the distance, and something about it suggested the dark figure was approaching at fantastic speed. Legs pounding, arms flailing wildly, it was running right at Melody; and she knew it meant to do awful things to her when it finally reached her.
By the time she got to the sixth and final portrait, again, all she could feel was shocked and numb. The way everything kept changing had knocked her off-balance. Kicked her feet out from under her. She couldn’t seem to find her mental bearings. Every time she thought she knew where she was, it had changed. There was nothing she could count on, nothing she could depend on. The whole world had become fluid, unreliable, untrustworthy. Because if an image could change, so could anything. The floor might become the ceiling, her precious controls might grow teeth and snap at her fingers. Left could become right, and real become unreal. Sanity and madness could flip-flop, and you wouldn’t even know which was which. She looked at the image of the stuffed fox head; and it laughed soundlessly at her.
Just like a dream, thought Melody, as she moved slowly to the left, to stand before the first poster again. Like a nightmare where everything keeps changing, and changing for the worst. Where sane and ordinary everyday things can become horrible and threatening, and there’s no safety anywhere.
Her head was swimming, and it was all she could do to stand upright. It felt like the floor of the lobby was rising and falling, like a clipper ship at sea. She put out her hands for something to lean on, to steady herself; but there was nothing. She felt hot and sweaty, like a fever she’d had as a child, when it felt like the whole world might melt and run away. Melody growled suddenly, a harsh warning sound from deep in her throat. She was under attack.
That realisation was like a splash of cold water in the face. She couldn’t trust her eyes any more. The world might not feel real any more, but that didn’t mean she was mad. It meant she was under psychic attack. There was danger close at hand; she could feel that very clearly. She felt that there was something she ought to be doing, but she couldn’t seem to clear her mind enough to think what. So she stared at the poster before her, studying the image with all her concentration as though she could make it behave through sheer strength of will.
The young woman in the wedding gown had left the bottom of the long stairway and come forward to press her face up against the other side of the poster as though it were the other side of a mirror. She glared out at Melody, her face twisted with rage and an inhuman malice. Bloody tears ran down her distorted face from her madly staring eyes and dripped steadily off her chin. Her wide-stretched mouth now had lips the colour of dried blood, and it was packed full of needle teeth. She’d raised her hands and slammed them flat against the other side of the poster, the other side of the glass, as though she were banging against it, trying to break through.
Melody wrenched her gaze away and stumbled off, to the left, to stand before the second poster again. The clipper ship was almost gone, only its pointed prow and the tops of the masts still showing above the raging sea. The sky was full of dark clouds and heavy, sleeting rain. The sea was full of sharks, and there were bits of men and long streaks of blood everywhere in the waters. As Melody watched, crimson-tinged waters dribbled down the lobby wall from the bottom of the poster, as though the sea was breaking through. Melody stepped carefully backwards, away from the bloody sea-water pooling on the floor at the foot of the wall.
She found herself standing before the next poster. The four young dead men had emptied their glasses of blood and crushed the glasses to bloody splinters in their unfeeling hands. One of them had turned and sunk his teeth deep into the neck of the young man beside him, who smiled foolishly out at Melody. The other two had come forward, advancing on the poster, as though they could see Melody watching them. Their split-fingered hands reached out to claw their way through the poster and into her world.
In the fourth poster, the headless young woman had stepped forward, out of her doorway. She was holding up her severed head with one hand, thrusting it out at the poster, at Melody. So the head could look right into Melody’s eyes. The severed head was screaming silently, endlessly, eyes wide with an unbearable horror. Blood fell from the severed neck in a dribbling stream.
In the fifth poster, in the wintry country scene, the dark figure was almost at the end of the narrow lane. He was running full tilt as though planning to break through, smash right through the poster, by sheer speed and impact. He was still only a dark figure, roughly human in shape, limbs flailing wildly…but the dimensions were all wrong. As though he was a man from some other world, close enough to ours to be disturbing in its differences.
And in the sixth, and final, poster…the huge, stuffed fox head shook and twisted on its wall plaque, laughing and howling soundlessly. It was so much closer now, its whiskered snout protruding right out of the poster, as though it had forced itself half-out of its world and half-into Melody’s, through sheer force of vicious intent. It snapped its jaws at her. The sharp teeth were red with fresh blood from some recent kill, and the head was so close now that Melody could smell its rank, damp, musky scent.
She looked into the fox’s mad, feral eyes and snarled right back at it. The fox hesitated, caught between moments, not expecting that. Melody stamped one foot hard, to force the floor to feel solid under her foot, and clenched her hands into fists until her nails dug painfully into her palms, and both hands ached from the effort. She laughed harshly into the fox’s face, then deliberately turned her back on it, and all the posters, and walked stiffly back to her scientific instruments. She set herself behind them, where she belonged, and looked down at what her readouts were telling her. She concentrated on every little bit of information, holding every light and number with her gaze, refusing to let them change in any way. Because if they said something was real, then it was. And if they didn’t, then it wasn’t. Her mind might betray her, but not her instruments.
“I trust my readings!” she said loudly. “I trust my machines and what they tell me about the world, and if they say you’re not real…You’re not real!”
She looked from one monitor screen to the next, from one readout to the next, concentrating. And bit by bit her head cleared, as her machines told her the lobby was perfectly normal. Her head stopped swimming, her legs became firm again, and the fever snapped off as though someone had thrown a switch. Melody wiped clammy sweat from her face with her sleeve and finally lifted her head and looked around the lobby. There were no posters on the walls. Never had been. If there had, of course she would have noticed them, and remembered them. There were a few empty wooden frames, here and there, where old posters might once have been; but that was all. Melody grinned nastily around her and patted the tops of her machines fondly, like they were pets that had remembered th
eir training.
“Good boys. I can always depend on you when some sneaky bastard is playing games with my head.”
She leaned forward, braced herself on top of her instruments with both hands, and let her head hang down for a moment, slowly bringing her ragged breathing back under control. Bringing herself back under control through sheer strength of will. She felt like she’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson, with an anvil on her back. But after a few moments, she brought her head back up proudly and sneered around the empty lobby, showing her teeth in a nasty grin.
“That the best you can do? It’ll take more than that to break me, you bastards!”
One by one, slowly and unhurriedly and without any fuss, the lights in the lobby began to go out. Melody swore briefly and checked her readouts. None of her sensors were indicating anything out of the ordinary, but the lobby lights were quite definitely dimming and going out. Faulty wiring in the lobby? Melody shook her head quickly. That was grabbing at straws, and she knew it. The last few lights went out in a rush, leaving Melody standing alone in the dark, in a small pool of light generated by her monitor screens and work lights. The dark around her was solid and impenetrable, without even an exit light. Melody kicked in the heavy-duty spotlights she’d incorporated into her equipment stand, for just such emergencies as this; but they didn’t make much difference. The pool of light surrounding her instruments grew a little brighter, but it didn’t expand one inch. The light couldn’t seem to push out into the darkness at all.
Melody made herself check her readings methodically, one by one. Everything was functioning as it should, but none of it was telling her anything useful. She glared about her, into the dark. She couldn’t see a damned thing. The lobby was…gone. She had a sudden horrible feeling that she was alone in the dark, that the rest of the world was gone, and only she and her small pool of light remained. As though the world had been taken away, or she had been taken out of it…like the old steam train at Bradleigh Halt. And now she was trapped, floating forever in an endless sea of darkness…She shook her head fiercely and took a firm hold on her thoughts. She wasn’t afraid of the dark. Darkness was only the absence of light. The world was still there; all her sensors said so. Which meant that this was another form of psychic attack. And like the posters, it might be scary, it might mess with her head, but nothing was happening that could actually hurt her.
She activated the communications system built into her decks and called Happy on his mobile. It rang and rang and rang, but nobody picked up. Which was odd. If Happy had turned his phone off, it would have gone straight to voice mail. So why wasn’t he answering? She tried reaching JC, but he didn’t answer either. Unless…someone was shutting off the sound, the same way it was shutting off the light…
Melody placed her hands flat on top of her instruments, and said to herself, I’m not afraid. I’m not. I don’t believe in any of this bullshit.
Her head came up sharply, and she glared out into the darkness. Someone was walking around. There were footsteps, in the dark. Not the loud and crashing impacts she’d heard before, up on the stage…but quiet, steady, perfectly ordinary footsteps. Melody listened carefully. On the whole she thought they sounded more like a man’s than a woman’s. And not a particularly big man, at that. Melody smiled. She could handle men. The footsteps walked round and round her pool of light, taking their time. Sometimes coming close but never actually emerging from the dark to enter into the light. Going on, round and round and round…
“Who’s there?” said Melody, in her most strident and challenging voice. “Identify yourself! Talk to me! Don’t make me come out there and get you!”
There was no reply. Only someone walking unseen, round and round her. Melody reached down, into the special cabinet set under the short-range sensors, and pulled out her favourite machine-pistol. She always kept a gun or two handy, for those moments when diplomacy had clearly failed. She aimed the machine-pistol out into the dark, right at the footsteps; and then hesitated. She didn’t want to fire blindly out into the darkness. If she randomly shot up the lobby, the theatre’s owners would be bound to kick up a fuss. Not that she really gave much of a damn, but she couldn’t justify it to herself, opening fire without an actual target. The others would look at the widely sprayed bullet holes, and they’d know. They’d look at her and think she’d become spooked, maybe even panicked. And she couldn’t have that.
And then all the lights came back on at once, quite suddenly, as though they’d never been away. Melody jumped, despite herself. She glared fiercely about her, sweeping the machine-pistol back and forth. The lobby looked back innocently, quiet and empty and ordinary. As though nothing at all had happened. A voice spoke behind her, and she spun round, bringing the machine-pistol up to fire; and then she stopped herself at the last moment. It was only Old Tom, the caretaker, standing quietly by the main doors in his long brown overall, regarding her with his usual vague smile and watery eyes. Melody lowered her gun and sighed loudly as the tension ran out of her.
“Where the hell have you been?” she said sharply. “We looked everywhere for you!”
“Oh, around,” said Old Tom. “Are you all right, miss? You look pale. You look like you’ve seen a ghost…”
Melody snorted briefly, embarrassed, and quickly put the machine-pistol away, out of sight. “What are you doing here?” she said brusquely.
“Taking a look around, miss, seeing what needs to be done. Before the whole cleaning crew comes in tomorrow. We’re going to have our work cut out for us here, miss, and no mistake. Still, it does take me back, being in the old place again. Good to see Benjamin Darke and Elizabeth de Fries again, too. I remember them, and their old friend Alistair Gravel; thick as thieves, the three of them. Always together, always getting into trouble…”
“Funny,” said Melody. “Benjamin and Elizabeth didn’t remember you.”
Old Tom shrugged easily. “No reason why they should, miss. They were important people, lead actors, and I…was staff. Actors and staff don’t mix, miss. Different people, different worlds. But I remember them; oh yes…They had this play they’d written, and Mr. Gravel was going to star in it. A play that would make them all rich and famous…And then, suddenly, Mr. Gravel was out! And they brought in this big film star to take over the lead. Can’t remember his name, on the tip of my tongue; you’d know it if I said it…”
“Frankie Hazzard,” said Melody.
“That was it!” said Old Tom, beaming at her. “Bless me; fancy you knowing that, miss. Anyway, the play went on, all right, but it wasn’t the huge success that everyone expected. Oh no. Died on its arse by all accounts. Very sad. Still, these things happen…”
“I heard that Alistair Gravel died,” said Melody.
“Bless you, no, miss!” said Old Tom. “He didn’t die. He disappeared. Didn’t turn up for rehearsal one day. Everyone looked for him, but there wasn’t a trace of him to be found anywhere. Didn’t leave a note, or anything. Bit of a mystery, really. You want to talk to Benjamin and Elizabeth, miss. If anyone knows what really happened back then, it’s those two. Still, can’t stand around here chatting with you, when there’s work waiting to be done! I’ll see you around, miss. You watch out for yourself.”
He nodded briskly, shuffled off, and disappeared through the main doors. Melody hardly noticed. She was thinking hard.
When she did finally look up, she noticed immediately that there was a single photo pinned to the Coming Attractions board, right by the main doors. Melody scowled at the board for a long moment. She hadn’t noticed any Coming Attractions board before, never mind a photo. Could she have overlooked it, because she was concentrating so hard on the posters? Or was it an illusion as well, put there to mess with her head some more? Could Old Tom have put it there, on his way out, for reasons of his own?
Melody came out from behind her instruments and advanced slowly and cautiously on the Coming Attractions board. A simple wooden easel, supporting a large plain board with a colour ten
-by-eight photo attached to it with a single drawing-pin. Couldn’t have looked more normal and ordinary if it had tried. Melody gave the easel the Happy test, by giving it a good hard kick, and the board rocked solidly back and forth. She prodded the photo with her fingertip, and it certainly felt real enough. She took a firm hold of the photo and pulled it free.
She shook it back and forth a few times, still half-expecting the thing to disappear, or fall apart into mists, in her grasp. But it gave every indication of being an actual photograph. Melody held it up before her and studied the image carefully. The photo showed three young people standing together, smiling broadly for the camera. From the artificial way they were posed, Melody assumed it was a promotional shot of some kind. The strap-line at the bottom of the photo gave the names of the three young people standing so happily together. Melody had already recognised the much-younger Benjamin Darke and Elizabeth de Fries, but she nodded slowly as she looked at the darkly handsome one in the middle: Alistair Gravel.
“So that’s what you look like,” she said finally. “What happened to you, Alistair? Why did you disappear? And why are your old friends Benjamin and Elizabeth so sure that you’re dead?”
SEVEN
OFFENSIVE CLOTHING
JC stood at the very front of the stage, looking out over the empty auditorium and bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. He was enjoying this case so far. Lots of clues, lots of entertaining weird shit, and, best of all, he had no idea what the hell was going on. JC always enjoyed a challenge. Something fiendishly complicated, and horribly fiendish, to test his smarts and his courage. JC never felt more alive than when jousting with death. More so these days because he had nothing else. Kim had been his reason for living; and with her gone, he had to find something else to fill his thoughts, to keep him from thinking about her.
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