ENTER GHOST

I walked the wet, dark streets of Berlin without any idea of where I was going until I arrived. An old theatre – the kind that still featured live actors on a stage, not the updated Hollywood equivalent. Most of the light bulbs on the marquee were burned out, but there were enough left to see the name of the show that was currently running: Hamlet. The lobby inside looked warm and inviting, so I considered ways to sneak in. As it turned out, I didn’t have to. The box office was empty, and the doors were open. I just walked inside. Maybe the theatre was desperate for more audience members. Times are hard in the arts these days. But times have always been hard in the arts.

There was no one in the lobby either, but I could hear voices from inside the auditorium, so I assumed the show was already well underway. I thought about stretching out on one of the padded benches against the walls. With any luck, I could get a few hours’ sleep. But eventually there would be an intermission or the show would end and people would come out and find me dozing there. Then it would be back into the rain for me. Do not go gentle into that good night, but go drunken and pushed. The story of my life. I’d be better off finding an empty seat in the audience and hope the theatre staff missed me when they cleaned up and went home after the show. It was live theatre, so I knew there’d be empty seats. Sorry to any thespians among you, but you know it’s true.

I followed the sounds of the actors’ voices to a door and slipped through it, into the darkness beyond. And it was complete darkness, not even a light from the stage. I’d entered in the middle of a blackout for a scene change.

I stumbled down the aisle until I tripped over someone’s foot and fell into an empty seat. No one in the audience said a thing. I couldn’t hear a single cough or anyone breathing. Not even a snore. It was the quietest theatre audience I’d ever found myself in.

Then the lights over the stage came on, and I stopped thinking about the audience.

I’ve sat through so many productions of Hamlet over the centuries that I knew instantly what scene it was, even though the only prop was a translucent curtain near the front of the stage, hanging from chains that disappeared into the darkness overhead. The bedchamber of Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, who was now shacked up with Hamlet’s uncle after the suspicious death of Hamlet Senior. The not-so-faithful royal servant, Polonius, stood on the near side of the curtain, his back to the audience. I guessed that to mean he was hiding in the closet, as per the stage directions of the play. Gertrude stood on the other side of the curtain, facing the audience. Hamlet entered from stage right.

“Now, mother, what’s the matter?” he said.

“Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended,” Gertrude said, without turning to face him. She was looking straight at me.

The actors spoke some more familiar lines, but I didn’t pay much attention to the words. I was too distracted by the people on the stage.

The part of Hamlet was being played by the faerie Puck. The actor playing Polonius was human, but when he looked around he had a dazed expression that marked him as one of the fey, the mortals forever caught in the thrall of the faerie and doomed to entertain them until they are lucky enough to get killed in some prank or other gone wrong.

But Hamlet and Polonius weren’t the ones I cared about. It was Gertrude who had all my attention. Or rather, Morgana, queen of the faerie, in the role of Gertrude. I didn’t know what she was doing up there on that stage, and I didn’t care. My longing for her welled up inside me and pushed me to my feet. If there hadn’t been the rows of seats between us, I would have run straight to her. I don’t know what I would have done then, but it probably wouldn’t have been good for my dignity. I truly, deeply hated her.

“Have you forgot me?” Morgana said and smiled at me as I stood there in the darkness before her.

“No, by the rood, not so,” Puck-Hamlet said.

“No,” I breathed.

I really needed to do something to break Morgana’s enchantment and her hold on me. Maybe once I was done admiring the way the stage lights turned her skin golden . . .

“What wilt thou do?” Morgana asked. “Thou wilt not murder me? Help, help, ho.” She said the words as if they amused her, but the fey played his lines to the hilt.

“Help, help, help!” he cried. Maybe he was just sticking to his part in the play, maybe he was making a broader statement about his fate. Hard to say, really. It didn’t matter in the end.

Puck drew his rapier and skewered the poor fey through the curtain. “O, I am slain,” Polonius said, but he sounded more relieved than anything else.

I’ve seen enough men killed by blades in my days to know this was the real thing and not a stage death. An observation that was confirmed when Polonius slid off the rapier and proceeded to stain the floorboards with his blood. The stage crew who had to clean up afterward weren’t going to be too happy about this turn of events.

“O me, what hast thou done?” Morgana said, raising an eyebrow.

“I know not,” Puck said. He prodded the corpse with the rapier and giggled.

“Oh, enough of this,” Morgana said, breaking character. She pushed Puck aside and strode to the front of the stage, not bothering to lift her dress clear of Polonius’s blood. She glared at me. “Cross, you know what happens next, do you not?”

I wondered why the audience wasn’t saying anything about this strange turn of events. None of them so much as turned a head my way. Maybe they thought it was experimental theatre. This was Berlin, after all.

I rubbed the latest bumps and bruises on my face thoughtfully. Maybe I was dreaming. Or more drunk than I had thought. Well, dreaming or drunk or not, I didn’t have much choice but to go along with things.

“The ghost?” I said in response to Morgana’s question. “The ghost of Hamlet’s father makes his appearance to announce his betrayal at the hands of, well, you.” The crowd continued to ignore me. Something was not quite right about this theatre.

“Do you see the ghost?” Morgana asked, folding her arms across her bosom. Her ample, perfect bosom.

I shook my head to clear it and looked back at the stage. “No ghost,” I confirmed.

“Its absence is notable because it has already made its appearance,” Morgana said. “The ghost does not merely haunt the character of Hamlet. Now it haunts our very play!”

“I’m not really following you,” I said. Oh, but I would follow her. I would follow her to the end of the world itself and beyond. I would follow her to . . . I slapped myself to focus on what was happening on the stage.

Morgana kicked the body of the fey. “A stage rapier with a collapsing blade,” she said. “We tested it. We were certain. And yet.” She took the weapon from Puck and thrust it into the body again. The sound of the blade stabbing into the wooden floor beneath the corpse echoed in the theatre. I waited for someone in the audience to react, but no one did.

“The blade was switched,” Morgana said. “Supernatural trickery, obviously.” She shook her head, as if she had never engaged in any acts of supernatural trickery herself.

“Personally, I’d bet my money it was Puck,” I said, not without good reason. Although I already had a feeling it wasn’t going to be that simple.

“I am honoured, m’lord,” Puck said, smiling and bowing in my direction.

Morgana waved him away. “I was prepared for that,” she said. “He was under strict orders and fear of iron not to make any mischief for this performance. As were all my subjects. So it was not any of us.”

I rubbed my face some more. I noted her words “this performance.” Which implied the faerie had produced other strange productions of Hamlet. Somehow I knew I was about to become involved in something I didn’t really want to know about. I was beginning to feel the hangover coming on, and I wasn’t even done with being drunk yet.

“Talk to me like I don’t know what’s going on,” I said. “Trust me, it won’t be hard.”

Morgana went over to the stairs at the edge of the proscenium and stepped down into the audience. A spotlight over the stage moved to follow her. No doubt operated by another poor fey, equally in her thrall as I was. She walked up the aisle to me, explaining things as she went and clearing up nothing. “You are aware, of course, of the passion the faerie have for theatre.”

“Of course,” I said. After all, who doesn’t know A Midsummer Night’s Dream was largely based on a real event? Although Shakespeare, crowd-pleaser that he was, did take out the parts about murder and bestiality. I guess he was content to leave that to the Jacobeans.

“I’m also aware of the passion the faerie have for chaos and tricks,” I added, nodding at the body, which was still twitching every now and then. And I didn’t have to point out I knew the faerie had a long history of wreaking havoc with stage productions of all kinds for their amusement. It was their own form of theatre.

“We live in chaos,” Morgana said, drawing close now, “and we feed on trickery.” She stopped beside me in the aisle and I could smell her perfume. It smelled of dead things in the ocean. It was the most beautiful scent in the world to me at that moment. I had to steady myself on the seat in front of me. “But this is not of our making. And we are not amused by it at all.”

I took a deep breath and forced myself upright again, which was harder than it sounds. It was even harder to stop myself from reaching out to her, for just a touch of that beautiful, ivory skin. I managed a shrug instead. “So someone or something switched the fake blade with a real one. What difference does one dead fey make? There’s plenty more where he came from.” I didn’t point out that whoever had killed the fey had probably done him a favour. There was no use in stating the obvious.

Morgana smiled that wicked smile of hers at me. Those lips . . . “We would not have invited you to this performance if it were only one dead fey,” she said.

She snapped her fingers and the houselights came up. Now I saw why the audience was so silent. They were all dead in their seats.

*

Peter Darbyshire’s The Dead Hamlets is out now, published by Poplar Press.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, BlueSky