For Mr. Gayer, who taught me the healing power of literature.

Late December, 1865

Mr. Simon Carter, director of the Gnome theater, waited restlessly in the dark outside the theater room in the main lobby. He couldn’t wait with a lamp, for he expected to see a blue light pour itself beneath and around the double doors very shortly and knew from experience that natural light was bright enough to obscure it.

He knew that he would see the blue light any moment now. It came every night, and by his careful records, it was coming sooner and sooner.

His pocket watch ticked away in the silence. Its mechanical repetition and Mr. Carter’s heartbeat were the only sounds in the Gnome theater.

No one else in the entire company was willing to monitor the haunting. So being the director, the responsibility fell to him--or so the company’s investors told him. According to their logic, related to Mr. Carter over long, contentious meetings, he was in charge of the stage. He commanded the people that got on the stage, and so he was also in charge of any ghosts that got on the stage.

That made sense--to them, at least.

Mr. Carter bitterly disputed their logic, but they countered with a point he could not dispute--he used their money.

Mr. Carter regretted the raise he gave his performers a few months back. It seemed to be a good idea at the time, it was a way to keep up everyone’s spirits after London was wiped off the face of the Earth in a massive, white fireball. It was a frighteningly unnatural catastrophe that shook the world from Japan to California, and no amount of scientists repeating that “ghosts are a natural, not supernatural phenomena and never again will such an event occur.” could quiet the existential fears of his Essex cast.

Extra money, however, was always appreciated in uncertain times.

But Mr. Carter couldn’t understand it--they used his money, yet they were at home sleeping in their beds while he was here, in the dark and silence.

Actors. They could talk to the ghost of King Hamlet, they could talk to the ghost of Julius Caesar, but could they stand to actually talk to a real ghost? No!

Suddenly, the blue light he had been expecting shined beneath the door frame. It flowed slowly underneath the door, like smoke, unlike any natural light born of fire or electric filament. It flowed underneath the door and then, to Mr. Carter’s surprise, through the door. The door itself absorbed the light like a sponge water and glowed blue

The blue light had never done that before. But it was the nature of ghostlight to be surprising.

The muttering that accompanied the blue light through the door was fortunately of the usual volume. At least that, if nothing else, was the same.

Ghostlight was what people called the blue radiance--normal people, that is. Those with personalities peculiar enough to research such things as ghostlight called it “a combination of dispersed ectoplasm and Odic energy.” But to the average man, it was light from a ghost, ghostlight. But from Mr. Carter’s perspective, it could have been called fairy dust, what was important was that it was the skin and bones of ghosts, and to ghosts with enough awareness, their ears and eyes, and potentially, even their arms.

If you could see the ghostlight, the ghost could see you. If you could touch the ghostlight, the ghost could touch you. That was what they said--though “could” was the operative word here. Not all ghosts were the same when it came to lucidity and thus sensitivity. Some ghosts were like sleeping dogs and could be touched without notice---if touched gently. Slowly. Softly.

Mr. Carter approached the door very, very slowly, and touched the door handle very, very gently.

The ghosts that haunted the Gnome Theater were evidently not very lucid. There was one thing a person could do, to Mr. Carter’s knowledge, that drew their attention, which he had learned by accident, but in his experience, their ghostlight could be touched without drawing their notice.

It was not the first time that Mr. Carter had touched ghostlight. He had touched it, night after night, for three weeks. But touching it now was just as strange as touching it the first time. It was strange in how it didn’t feel like anything. The door suffused with ghostlight felt just like the door in daytime. There was no heat. There was no chill. It was only light, but oh, what ghosts could do with that light, according to the stories!

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Mr. Carter tried not to think of the stories as he opened the door, tried not to think about how a ghost in Boston once tossed a man into the sky. Where that man landed, if he landed at all, was unknown to this day. He tried not to think about how a ghost in Berlin pulled an entire boat down into the Spree and held the passengers to the riverbed until their faces were blue and inflated. He tried not to think about a million ghost stories that proved the old aphorism “The living have no defense from the dead.”

But he thought of a few of them, anyway. He couldn’t help it. Mr. Carter was the kind of man whose mind was but a stage for thoughts to play upon.

Very slowly, very gently, Mr. Carter pushed the door open.

There were no lamps lit inside the theater, but all was aglow from the performers on stage.

Men whose skin and costumes were all of the same eerie blue crowded the stage. They were a shade of blue Mr. Carter had only ever seen in the arcs of electricity, only ever in the brass tubes of natural philosophers demonstrating scientific principles to laypersons such as himself or in the sky-splitting fall of a lightning bolt.

It was a soft shade of blue, a radiant shade of blue, and if there was no form behind the color, Mr. Carter would have found it a very soothing sight.

But oh, how disquieting was that color when it was in the form of people!

Mr. Carter did not recognize the men pacing and gesturing on stage. They certainly weren’t anyone that graced the stage in life. He was the first director of the Gnome theater and none of his players had died. But he did recognize who the men portrayed.

There was Brutus in his toga, dagger held close to his side, a look of stoic resolve on his face. There was Hamlet putting on an antic disposition, darting here and there in the throes of mock madness. There was Falstaff, rotund and jovial and ill-fitting in his armor, and Prospero, wise and thoughtful.

They did not act together. Each ghost seemed unaware that he shared the stage with others. They flowed through each other as they moved across the stage like clouds blowing through clouds. King Lear walked through Brutus. Brutus gestured and his hand went through Hamlet’s face. Hamlet walked into Prospero’s shoulder.

They did not act together, but they all spoke together, and the cacophony was maddening.

Mr. Carter thought Hell might have sounded like the stage--loud, incoherent, and meaningless. He thought Hell might have also looked like the stage. Perhaps in Hell, souls did the same actions, all the time, forever and ever. Perhaps in Hell, all the varieties of mankind were trapped together, but were unaware of each other. As one, they toiled alone, without reason or purpose and acted out at living, but never truly lived.

Mr. Carter crept closer and kept himself low to the ground and hidden by the audience chairs. He did not want to be seen, for while the ghosts could not feel him crawling through their ghostlight, he knew that they could see and hear as a man could see and hear.

They had seen him before, and he did not want to repeat that horrible experience.

In an attempt to calm himself, Mr. Carter reminded himself that hauntings were not so uncommon in this modern year of 1865. Ghosts were once a disputed fact of reality but now they were a topic of study. Manesology had been a branch of scientific inquiry since Edward James published Multiple Intelligences Within The Human Body in 1861. Mr. Carter reminded himself that this was not a supernatural phenomena. He didn’t understand the physical, precise mechanics behind the ghosts, he couldn’t begin to understand the mechanics, but he couldn’t understand the precise mechanics of the flu that knocked him down season after season, but that didn’t mean the flu was incomprehensible. This haunting was scientific, understandable, and controllable.

But as Mr. Carter crept closer, he realized that repeating the words of the manesologists did very little to bolster his flagging courage.

When he got close enough to see the front of the stage, he saw something that made his heart leap in his chest.

There were more ghosts than he had seen from the back of the theater. Up close to the stage, he could now see that there were some who were off the stage---Othello and Oberon and someone else whose arms were the only visible part with the rest of him stuck inside the stage itself.

This had never happened before! Night after night, Mr. Carter had observed the haunting. The number of ghosts had steadily increased, and that had been some cause for concern, but the ghosts had never gone off the stage! Never! Mr. Carter had even dared to hope that the stage was some sort of prison for the ghosts and its boundaries, something they could not break. But they were breaking those boundaries before his very eyes!

Mr. Carter made a little noise in the back of his throat, but he wasn’t aware that he had made that noise until the sound was up on the air and in the blue ears of ghosts.

The cacophony stopped. Total silence filled the theater. The ghosts stopped moving, stopped acting, stopped talking, and turned, as one, to leer in silence at Mr. Carter.

The ghosts had done this before, when one night Mr. Carter’s pocket watch fell out of his pocket and clattered to the floor. Mr. Carter was frightened by the ghosts then as he was now.

Their faces were empty masks that expressed nothing in their blank features. Falstaff did not grin. Hamlet did not frown.

They looked, and only looked.

Mr. Carter did not know why they looked at him, he could not even guess. But he knew that when they looked at him, they did not look at him as their characters. It was not Othello, or Halet, or Brutus that looked at him. It was not the characters that leered, but the actors.

It was the ghosts, dead men, that looked at him with emotionless eyes and expressionless faces.

And Mr. Carter could not begin to guess what they wanted from him, if they wanted anything from him at all.

He was frozen to the spot, on his hands and knees.

Then he stood up, rising slowly, moving one knee beneath himself, and then the other.

He walked backwards the way he came in, never taking his eyes off the ghosts, for they never took theirs off him.

Mr. Carter continued walking backwards until he could see the frame of the doors he had opened previously stand before him. Ahead of him, framed like a portrait by the doorframe, the faces of the actors had gathered together.

Not an eye in the theater wanted to leave him.

Then, Mr. Carter, as slowly and as gently as he had opened the door, closed it.

And then, with that little barrier giving him a little courage, he turned his back on the nightmare, and he ran.