“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.”
r /> 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?”