Ghost of a Dream

by Simon R. Green

  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 a
n 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.”