checked the arms cabinet, and the machine-pistol was back in place, as though it had never been away, along with everything else. She ran one hand caressingly over the gun, but she didn’t take it out. She didn’t want the owner of the voice thinking she was afraid of him.
Her head came up sharply, as she heard footsteps approaching from outside. Slow, steady, apparently perfectly normal footsteps, barely audible above the muted traffic noise from the street. Heading straight for the main entrance doors.
“Oh come on!” Melody said loudly. “Not that trick again! Getting really tired of that! It didn’t work last time, and it won’t work now!”
The entrance doors crashed open, and he came in.
Something new and terrible had come to the Haybarn Theatre. Something that was not what it appeared to be.
He came swaggering into the lobby, head held high and hands thrust deep into trouser pockets, bringing with him all the arrogant assured cockiness that JC used to have. He wore a very smart and expensive coal grey suit, complete with a waistcoat of many colours. He had slicked-back jet-black hair and dark, unblinking eyes. Eyes as cold and inhuman as a shark’s and just as hungry. He had a smile like Satan’s, a smile that never stopped. He sauntered around the lobby and then slammed to a halt right in front of Melody, on the other side of her wall of instruments. Everything about him looked perfect. Impossibly, inhumanly perfect. He was heavily built, though muscle and bulk rather than fat. A huge, overpowering, physical presence. The kind that makes you feel it would be dangerous to look away, not because he was a clear and present danger but because he was always going to be the most important thing in the room; and you might miss something important.
His face might have been classically handsome if there’d only been some character in it; but though everything was in the right place, in all the right proportions, it looked more like a mask. With those eyes, and that smile. Melody made a point of sneering at him, on general principles, to let him know she didn’t impress that easily.
“Hello, Melody,” he said, and it was the soft purring voice she’d heard coming out of her phone. The voice of a man who’d never lost a fight and wasn’t about to start now. “I am the Faust. Horror without end, amen. I made a deal with The Flesh Undying. Didn’t sell my soul, in return for the pleasures of the flesh. Rather, I sold my flesh in return for a better soul. Have you any idea what it is you and your fellow Ghost Finders are up against? I gave up ownership of my flesh, to The Flesh Undying, to be its presence in the world; and in return, it promised me I’d never have to die. How cool is that? And now, I am so much more than I used to be. And so much more powerful, of course. Ah, the things I can do…”
“Like to make speeches, don’t you?” said Melody.
The Faust shrugged easily. “Comes with the job. And the territory.”
He turned his back on her and strode off to saunter around the lobby again, taking it all in and looking it all over as though he were planning on buying it, then destroying it, then pissing on the ruins because he could. He ended up back before Melody and sneered equably at her ranks of scientific equipment.
“There is something to be said for improvisation in the face of jeopardy, I suppose. Look at it…Something old, something borrowed, something cobbled together at the last minute. None of it of any real use against something like me.” He cocked his great head on one side and considered her happily. “Did you enjoy my posters? My little mental movies? Nothing like a good video nasty, I always say.”
“You put that shit in my head?” said Melody.
“No,” said the Faust. “Everything you saw came from inside your head. All the things you’re afraid of, little girl.”
“If you were as powerful as you claim, you’d have killed me by now,” said Melody.
The Faust smiled and waggled one finger at her, roguishly. “Now where’s the fun in that?”
“Are you responsible for the haunting here?” said Melody. “All the weird shit we’ve been seeing?”
“I just got here,” said the Faust. “I don’t know what’s going on in this dreary little playhouse; and I don’t care. I didn’t come here for the ghosts; I’m here for the Ghost Finders. Not because you present any real danger to The Flesh Undying, you understand, because you don’t. But there is the smallest possibility that you might become a nuisance. Eventually…So I’m going to destroy you now. Leave three new ghosts to moan and wander in this dusty old theatre. If it wasn’t haunted before, it will be.”
“Getting really tired of hearing you talk,” said Melody. “In fact, hold that pose. I’ve got a bloody big gun here, somewhere.”
“What shall I start with?” said the Faust. “Something suitably theatrical, I think. What’s the point of murder without a little style? Let us call up the dust of ages and set it to work.”
He gestured languidly with one meaty hand, and all the dust in the lobby, left untroubled and untouched for twenty years and more, rose everywhere. It sprang up from the floor and jumped off the walls and ceiling to dance madly on the lobby air, forming and re-forming into stretching shapes that bordered on meaning, before abruptly condensing into two dark grey, vaguely human figures. Soft but substantial living shadows…and where their faces should have been, the old traditional masks of Comedy and Tragedy. Endlessly laughing, endlessly crying. The ancient symbols of Drama, topping tall and spindly bodies, stretched and stylised, almost art deco. They danced and capered around the Faust, fawning and bobbing their heads, cringing under his shark’s gaze and devil smile.
“Here is Drama, come to do my will,” said the Faust. “Two small and pitiful things, but mine own. Because I don’t see why I should get my hands dirty, dealing with something as small and insignificant as you, little girl. So… Go and get her, you nasty little things. Make a mess.”
The two grey figures tore themselves away from adoring the Faust and danced towards Melody, throwing wild, extravagant shapes as they pirouetted in rapid circles around her and her equipment. Dark liquid monsters of inhuman suppleness and horrible malice, soaked in menace and vicious intent. Melody sneered right back at them, holding her ground, refusing to be impressed or intimidated.
“Get the hell away from my machines!” she said coldly.
“Dust is the mortal enemy of computers, is it not?” said the Faust. “Ah, what it is, to put the iron in irony!”
The dark grey figures froze in place while he spoke. He waved them on with a languid hand, and they surged forward. Melody grabbed the machine-pistol from out of its resting place and opened fire. She raked the gun steadily back and forth, blowing great holes through the leaping, darting figures; but it didn’t harm them, and it didn’t stop them. They were, after all, only dust. The bullets tore right through to chew up the wall behind them. Plaster cracked and wood chips blew.
“It occurs to me,” she said, “that I am wasting perfectly good ammunition that I might have a better use for later. Let the dust come. My machines are top-of-the-line, and can look after themselves. And the dust can’t hurt me. Since those things are really nothing more than the left-overs from an old vacuum cleaner.”
“Ah,” said the Faust happily. “But I have made them so much more. You can drown in dust, if there’s enough of it. And they…are all the dust there is. They will fill you up from the inside out, little girl; and I shall stand right here and watch while they do it and laugh and laugh.”
“Yeah?” said Melody. “Watch this.”
She leaned forward and hit one big red button, and the two grey figures were gone in a moment, blasted apart by an unseen force. Nothing more than millions of dust motes, scattered across the lobby. They hung on the air in a thin, dusty mist, slowly settling, falling back to the floor. No trace remained of the smiling, scowling faces. Melody smiled brightly at the Faust.
“Localised electromagnetic pulse,” she said smugly. “Blasting out from my carefully isolated machines so as not to disturb them, and so limited in scope it didn’t even affect the lobby’s electric lighting. But more than enough to see off your dusty attack dogs.”
The Faust sighed loudly. “I tried to do it quickly and cleanly, I tried to deal with you in a civilised manner, but no…you had to be difficult. It seems I have no choice but to go all Old School on you, little girl.”
“Stop calling me that!” said Melody.
