Avery was late again and Phoebe alternated her time between pacing the stage, checking her phone, chewing her nails, and cursing him under her breath. She’d already had to fight David to incorporate this effect into the play in the first place, and every delay or hiccup made it that much more likely that he was going to scrap it.
“This is a college production of Hamlet,” he’d said, the umpteenth time they had argued about it, “not Poltergeist. We don’t need a fancy ghost. Just slap some white makeup on him and push him out on stage.”
Fortunately, she had eventually won, partly by arguing that the effect wouldn’t take any resources out of regular rehearsals—meaning that she and Avery, and occasionally Luis, who was playing Hamlet, had to run through the tech rehearsals on their own time—and partly by agreeing to sort all the costumes from the costume bins at the back of the prop room, which hadn’t been properly done in the three years she had been attending Dircks University.
For the third time that evening, Phoebe walked out into the lobby and watched the rain streak down the windows. It had been pouring on and off most of the week, and everything felt wet and clammy, the kind of cold that sunk into your bones and never seemed to warm up. The rooms backstage all smelled of mildew, as they did anytime the weather turned damp.
This time, as she watched the rain moving like translucent snakes across the tall glass, she saw Avery coming up the front steps, his shoulders hunched against the downpour. He wore the same long, olive-colored coat he wore everywhere, and carried no umbrella. His shoulders and hair were soaked, plastered to him, and he looked thinner, somehow, than he had the last time she saw him, which had only been two days ago, as if his coat was going to swallow him up.
Setting aside her annoyance for the moment, she pushed open the front door as he approached and he stepped inside, shaking the water from his arms and hands and doing a quick little two-step on the rug, which was still sopping from people coming and going earlier in the day.
“Nice of you to make it,” she said.
“Sorry,” Avery replied, looking up at her for the first time. His eyes were red rimmed, with dark circles around them that made it seem a little like he was already wearing his ghost makeup. Frankly, he looked like shit. “Rough day.”
“Been a lot of those?” Phoebe asked, more archly than she meant to because she was still mad, but her anger was starting to temper simply due to how forlorn he looked. She and Avery had known each other for years now. They were in the same class, and had taken Intro to Theater together as freshmen. She’d had a crush on him ever since, even though she learned quickly that he wasn’t actually her type—too flighty and too self-absorbed, like most actors she had known.
“Yeah,” was all he said, walking past her into the auditorium. He left his coat dripping on one of the seats, and she followed a few steps behind as he descended toward the orchestra pit. It was the pit that had given her the idea in the first place. It had been years since there was an actual orchestra to play here, from before her time at Dircks, and last year they had torn the floor out of the pit as part of a planned auditorium renovation that never got much farther than that.
In so doing, they had discovered that the floor of the pit was actually a platform, and the pit dropped a full three feet below, to a secret room—secret only insofar that it had been closed off over the years, she found when she asked Dr. Gaspard about it—built beneath the stage.
“At one time,” Dr. Gaspard told her, “we had the whole works down there. A trapdoor where we could raise and lower actors onto the stage via a sort of dumbwaiter. All that jazz. They decided to shut it down in the ’70s because it was a liability risk and also expensive to maintain, I imagine, but they just walled it up. Could have used it for storage, you’d think.”
The space under the stage was low and dark, broken up by the wooden support posts that held up the stage itself. But a person who wasn’t too tall could stand straight down there, and so it was where Phoebe had rigged up her blue room.
She hadn’t become a stage manager because she loved yelling at the lighting guys or arguing with David. What intrigued her were things like this. The tricks of the trade. The idea of a secret elevator that carried actors to and from the stage for quick changes. Makeup that only appeared under light of a certain color. She had always been less interested in the magic trick itself than in how it was performed.
More than anything, though, she wanted to pull off a Pepper’s ghost, an idea that was already old-fashioned by the time she started at Dircks, and not in the repertoire of very many college theatrical companies. “Audio video people do them now,” Dr. Gaspard had told her when she brought the idea to him in his office. “They call them holograms and put them up on music video award shows. You can even do one on your phone, with the right equipment. Nobody does them on stage.”
“They’re hokey,” is what David had said.
“They only became hokey because everyone was doing them,” she retorted. “Most of the people in our audience will never have seen one, unless they’ve been to Disney World. It’ll be a novelty to them.”
“Everything old is new again,” had been Gaspard’s only contribution to the argument. This production of Hamlet was David’s senior project, and Gaspard had given him free reign on it, so long as he kept it under budget and brought it to stage on time. Given that she was in her third year, it might also be Phoebe’s last opportunity to do a Pepper’s ghost before she graduated and moved on to some job that would pay her peanuts and give her basically no creative control. So she had pushed—and promised, and acquiesced—and eventually gotten her way, at least for now.
“Jesus, it’s dark down here,” Avery was saying, from the entrance to the blue room beneath the stage, hidden from the audience by the walls of the orchestra pit.
“It won’t be when you’re working,” she said. She hit the switch that brought up the blue LEDs that she had already installed along the floor and ceiling—and around the support pillars that he might otherwise smack into. The glow filtered out while you were looking into the pit, but it was invisible to the audience so long as the stage lights or the house lights were up even a little bit. She had checked from every angle, even the balcony.
“Tell me again how this works?” Avery asked, stooping to step down into the blue room.
“There’s a sheet of plexiglass set at an angle in front of part of the stage,” Phoebe said, rapping her knuckles against it as she followed him. “The audience can’t see it, so long as Maya in lighting does her job right. You’ll be down here, doing the scene just like you would if you were up on the stage. Luis will be on stage, standing to the side of the plexiglass, doing his part. When you’re supposed to appear, the lights up there go down and a light down here comes up. Your reflection will appear on that sheet of plexiglass up there, and the audience will be able to see you even though you’re down here.”
“So why don’t I just do it on stage?”
“Because you’ll look translucent. Like a ghost,” she said. “It’ll be cool, I promise.”
She followed him down in the blue room, and hoped that she was right.
Because the stage was not well set up for it, making the illusion work had required a little creative engineering on Phoebe’s part. In a more classic Pepper’s ghost setup, the blue room would have been nearer the wall of the orchestra pit, or off to the side of the stage, where it would be more obviously aligned with the sheet of plexiglass. Here, however, some careful arrangements had been necessary to ensure that the light that illuminated Avery was invisible to the audience, even while Avery was visible on the plexiglass.
Though it had been a lot of hard work, done during what was ostensibly her free time, she had never felt more energized in all of her time studying production techniques or working as stage manager for the little theater at Dircks. It helped to distract her from how lousy Avery seemed to be having it, meaning that she didn’t really notice the changes in him until it was time to actually do the makeup test and run his lines with the ghost effect working.
When she met him three years ago, Avery had been a very pretty boy, with sandy blond hair and the high cheekbones that were part of why he was chosen to play the ghostly figure of Hamlet’s father. In the weeks leading up to the play, however, he had grown visibly thinner, his eyes seeming to sink into their sockets so that he hardly needed the dark-ringed makeup that Kelly had concocted to make him into a ghost.
On the night of the makeup test, Phoebe was there early to make sure everything was set up and ready. She even cleaned the plexiglass piece herself—it had to be clear enough that the audience wouldn’t see it, or even suspect it, no easy task in a theater filled with stage hands running back and forth behind the scenes. It was raining again that night, which was why she was standing just inside the stage door, blowing cigarette smoke out into the wet night, when Avery arrived.
A red Prius pulled up in the alley behind the auditorium, and Avery started to get out the passenger side, his coat once again hunched up around his shoulders. He paused halfway out, though. The rain had slacked off since Phoebe started smoking, and now it drummed haphazardly on the roof of the car, and on the panel of Avery’s door, where it hung open, allowing Phoebe to catch parts of the conversation.
“Avery, no,” a woman’s voice said from inside, in response to something Avery had said that Phoebe missed. “You said you needed a ride because it’s raining. That’s it.”
Avery was talking into the car, his voice partly swallowed up be its interior, and he sounded beat down and quiet anyway, pleading. “—all this,” was what she caught of his reply, followed by, “Rene, can we please—”
The driver said something else that Phoebe missed, and then, “If you’re going to be like this, don’t call me the next time you need a ride.”
The car started to pull forward, even though Avery hadn’t yet shut his door, jerking it out of his hand and setting him off balance. He stumbled slightly in the rain, but didn’t fall, his hand opening and closing on the empty air where the door had just been. He turned away without stepping forward to shut it, and the car surged forward a little further before Phoebe saw a woman’s arm reach out from inside, grab the door handle, and pull the passenger door shut.
“Are you all right?” she asked as Avery climbed up the stairs and pushed the stage door open with his shoulder.
“Just another rough day,” he said, trying to flash a smile at her. When she first met him, his smile had been able to light up a room and send her heart fluttering, make her joints feel weak. Now, though, it was the brave smile of a cancer patient who doesn’t want to worry their family, worse than if he hadn’t smiled at all.
The only other people at the first makeup test were Kelly and Eric, and Phoebe had been forced to convince both of them to come in on their days off so they could run the test without cutting into normal rehearsal time. Eric got Avery into his costume back stage, and the actor slumped in the makeup chair in a full suit of black armor, albeit made of cardboard, while Kelly put the details on his wan face.
As much as the Pepper’s ghost effect was Phoebe’s baby, once they got Avery down into the blue room and fired it up, even she had to admit that it wouldn’t have worked as well without Kelly’s makeup. The black armor, which Kelly had also designed, was all thick gorgets and pauldrons that made him look something like a marionette, while the skull-like makeup caused Avery’s real features to recede, so that it looked as if an untethered skull wearing a simple crown delivered the lines, floating above the armor itself.
“But that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house,” Avery’s voice boomed across the stage, “I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood.”
Down in the blue room, he had a microphone that was wired to make his voice sound not merely like he was on the stage, but above it, such that the ghost’s speech seemed to come from all around the actor playing poor Hamlet.
Phoebe was sitting out in the audience, about midway back, and she could tell that it worked. The ghost of Hamlet’s father seemed to float in the air around the set of the castle battlements, the voice seemed to resound from everywhere and nowhere, overwhelming the space while also keeping a surprising note of human suffering that had to be attributed to Avery’s performance which, even in this test run, appeared unmarred by his “rough days.” If anything, he delivered the lines with more feeling than he ever had in early rehearsals.
Once she had moved around the house, checking the angles from a bunch of different seats, Phoebe was finally satisfied enough to call a cut and let everyone go home. She made sure to tell them all that they had done a great job, especially Kelly, and after she and Eric had departed, Phoebe went through, turning out the lights, only then noticing that Avery hadn’t left.
He was still sitting in the makeup chair, staring into the mirror. Kelly had scrubbed the paint off his face before she left but, in the semi-darkness, you couldn’t tell. His eyes seemed like pits, the shadows around his cheeks and mouth so deep and dark that his face could have been a puckered skull. Again, Phoebe felt a twinge of guilt for not noticing his condition sooner. She put a gentle hand on his shoulder, causing him to start, pulling his unseeing gaze from the mirror and up toward her. She could only see his eyes because the light reflected in them.
“Sorry,” he said, “must have zoned out.”
“Are you okay?” she asked again.
“Rene broke up with me,” he said, his voice hollow of any feeling. “She said I was needy.”
Phoebe cast her mind back, trying to picture a Rene, but couldn’t do it. She knew that Avery had never had any shortage of girls on his arm over the three years they’d been at Dircks. For various reasons, including to preserve her own sanity, she had never kept very good track of them, for all that she and Avery were ostensibly friends. It occurred to her now that this latest one, the one who must be Rene, who she couldn’t quite conjure up a mental picture of, must have lasted longer than any of the others because, even though Phoebe couldn’t composite a face, she knew that it had been the same girl at the cast party for Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and that had been six months ago.
“You are needy,” Phoebe said, but gently.
“I know,” he replied quietly. “But I always have been. I didn’t change.”
“Come on,” Phoebe said, squeezing his shoulder. “I’ve got to lock up. Do you need a ride home? I think it started raining again.”
On the drive over to Avery’s apartment—Phoebe was surprised to realize that she still knew where it was—he sat with his head back against the headrest of her Civic, his eyes closed. Neither of them said much, and the radio mumbled in the background, a DJ going on about something that the volume was turned down too far to hear.
When she pulled up in front of his building, Phoebe thought for a moment that Avery had gone to sleep. Then he let out a small, deflated sound. “Thanks for the ride,” he said, before he opened his eyes. He put his hand on the door handle but didn’t open it yet. “I’m sorry about rehearsals and stuff,” he said. “I know I’ve been late a lot.”
“You’ve been doing great, though,” Phoebe said. She had been mad at him, maybe a part of her still was, but she also hurt for him a little, and tonight, at least, she felt guilty about neglecting their friendship, even if it was to protect her own heart. Besides, he really had been doing great. She’d never seen him give a performance as good.
“Thanks,” he said, trying to smile again. She wished he wouldn’t. Now, in the reflected light of the streetlamp, it made him look like the ghost.
They only had one full tech and dress rehearsal before the first show. It was all hands on deck. The sound guy up in the booth, cueing thunder noise and background swordfight sounds, the lighting crew on the catwalks, the extras and the actors all in their various faux-Elizabethan costumes, or as close as the costume department was able to get. And Phoebe had to manage it all, while also keeping tabs on everything to make her pet project go off.
To ensure that it worked how it was supposed to, she had largely taken the Pepper’s ghost effect out of the hands of the lighting and sound departments. The lighting crew had instructions on how much to dim the stage lights for the scene, but the light down in the blue room, and the microphone, she controlled with a remote that she kept zipped in her jacket pocket.
Because she was rushing around putting out fires and making sure everything else was where it needed to be, when it needed to be there, she didn’t see Avery come in that night, but Ben, one of her assistants, told her he was there. She didn’t get a chance to look in until the run-through had already begun, but when Barnardo and Francisco were first speaking their lines on the battlements, she poked her head down into the blue room beneath the stage.
The LEDs she had placed down there made it blue in fact as well as name, and in their dim glow she could see Avery only as a sort of rough-hewn shape piled in the chair at the far end of the space. She considered going over to him, but his first appearance was just a few minutes away and besides she could see Lea trying to get her attention from the wings. Phoebe settled for a wave, and was heartened when the outline of Avery extended one hand in a thumbs-up.
The first time she kicked on the light in the blue room was when the ghost appeared before Barnardo, Macellus, and Horatio. In that scene, Avery didn’t have any lines, he merely popped up at one end of the space, seeming to float above the gap beyond the battlements, and then moved slowly to the other end, at which time she shut off the light and he vanished again.
“It harrows me with fear and wonder,” Derek, who was playing Horatio, said as he stared at the empty space where the ghost would look to be, for anyone who was sitting in the audience. It was the part that Phoebe had worried most about—the other actors playing opposite an empty space, rather than another performer. It wouldn’t be so difficult for Luis, who would at least have Avery’s voice over the speaker, but she was pleased at how Derek and the other two did their parts in this first scene.
She had maneuvered herself into the auditorium by the time the ghost appeared, so that she could see the effect of the Pepper’s ghost with everything in place. She wasn’t disappointed. Avery looked every inch the part when he appeared above the stage. His eyes were sunken to nothing, disappearing beneath the makeup and the effect of the light. He seemed to flicker in the air, hovering above the stage. He looked lost and terrible and perfect.
“I have to hand it to you,” David said to her, after the rehearsal. “You pulled it off.”
She went looking for Avery, to congratulate him and thank him for his hard work, but Kelly said he had already left. “He smelled like vodka when I was doing his makeup,” she said. “But he got through all his lines okay.”
Phoebe went to the stage door and looked out. That night it wasn’t raining, but the pavement was still wet from earlier, and the streetlights reflected on the alley outside. She didn’t see Avery anywhere, though.
She spent all of opening day in the theater, checking and double-checking, but she still tried to call Avery twice, once from her cell phone, and once from the phone in the office. He didn’t answer either time.
By curtain call, they had a full house, which wasn’t unusual on opening night. Plenty of classes gave out extra credit to students who attended the school’s productions. But it meant that everything backstage was twice as hectic even than it had been during dress rehearsal, and Phoebe breathed a sigh of relief when she saw Avery in the makeup chair, already decked out in his cardboard armor.
She wanted to go over and say something to him, at least squeeze his shoulder in support, but she was juggling too many things and by the time she reached the makeup chair he was gone, probably already making his way to the blue room.
With the audience in their seats just on the other side of the curtain, making the noise of a living ocean to drown out the hurried work that they were still doing behind the scenes, there was only one way in or out of the blue room without being seen by the spectators, and that was the old trap door that was still at the back of the stage. Phoebe couldn’t exactly go around to the orchestra pit and poke her head in. So, she and Avery had arranged a simple signal—he would send her a text to let her know that he was in place.
Still, she was a bit surprised when her phone buzzed in her pocket and, checking it, she saw simply a thumbs-up emoji from Avery’s number. “Did he seem okay?” she managed to ask Kelly, while she was putting pancake makeup onto Derek’s face.
“He felt cold and I think he’d been crying,” Kelly whispered back. “He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t smell as much like booze.”
Not that there was much she could do about it if he hadn’t. They had run out of time, and it was enough that he was in his place. When the house lights dimmed and the stage lights came up, Phoebe had too many other things on her mind to worry about Avery, and she just prayed that everything went smoothly when she activated the light in the blue room.
“The bell then beating one,” Marcus, who played Bernardo, was saying, and she kicked on the light for the first time.
The figure that appeared in the air before the crowd—invisible to the actors, who reacted nonetheless because that’s what they had practiced to do—was an apparition if ever there had been one. Avery’s gaunt appearance plus Kelly’s superb makeup combined with the effect of the Pepper’s ghost arrangement to create a baffling illusion, even for Phoebe, who had set it all up. The sounds the audience made suggested that they were equally impressed.
Every other time they had tried it out, Avery’s ghost figure had appeared facing where the actors would be standing. This time, he was turned partly away, as if the light in the blue room had come up when he wasn’t expecting it. Rather than ruin the illusion, however, it heightened the effect. The ghost seemed as lost as a ghost should, and when he gradually turned toward the three cowering actors, it was as though he didn’t see them at all.
“Stay,” Derek shouted up on stage. “Speak, speak! I charge thee speak!” Phoebe cut the light in the blue room and let out a gust of breath that she had not realized she was holding. So far, everything was working like a charm, and the only thing left to go wrong with her carefully-cultivated plan was the microphone intended to capture Avery’s lines in scene five.
By the time that scene rolled around, she was already breathing a little easier, despite several minor snafus she had been required to clean up behind the scenes. Avery had appeared twice more, and each time performed his pantomime with a sensitivity that had been absent even from his earlier rehearsals.
As scene five opened and she fired up the light and prepared to open the mic, Avery appeared once more above the battlements, this time facing Luis as Hamlet. He looked, if anything, even more wasted away than he had before. Kelly’s makeup included lines up his lips to simulate the bared teeth of a skull, and here they seemed to genuinely yawn around blackness as he spoke.
“I am thy father’s spirit,” Avery’s voice came from everywhere and nowhere, “doomed for a certain term to walk the night and for the day confined to fast in fires . . . ”
He had never sounded better, and even Luis seemed taken aback, which played into Hamlet’s reaction to the appearance of his tormented sire.
“List, list, O, list!” Avery said, his voice crackling with emotion. “If thou didst ever thy dear farther love—”
There was a hall on the east side of the auditorium that led to an emergency exit at the back of the building. It was accessible from backstage, and midway down its length there was a side door into the crowded auditorium. Phoebe was standing there, watching the Pepper’s ghost from the vantage point of the audience, when her phone buzzed in her pocket. She took it out, and saw a text from Avery, somehow, even though he was on stage now, for all intents and purposes, his ghostly image speaking to Hamlet above the battlements.
All it said was her name, with no punctuation.
“Murder most foul, as in the best it is,” Avery’s voice was saying from the speakers. “But this most foul, strange and unnatural.”
She heard gasps from the audience and looked up from her phone. At a glance the tableaux was the same. Luis as Hamlet was promising revenge on wings as swift as the thoughts of love, but something was very wrong. Avery’s head seemed to be expanding. It still looked like a skull, but now it was splitting, from the base of the jaw up to the nose, the jawbones becoming like mandibles as the blue light that made the ghost poured out from inside.
“Lethe,” Avery’s slurred voice said from the speakers, skipping over many of his lines in-between. “Lethe.”
Luis stepped back, his eyes turning out toward the audience, breaking the fourth wall but actually looking, Phoebe thought, at the back of the piece of plexiglass, on which the image of Avery’s ghost was projected. The ghost was continuing to grow, its back bending, the suit of black armor somehow expanding to accommodate its swelling torso.
“Oh God,” Luis said, his lines now abandoned entirely. “I can see it. I can see it!”
The murmuring of the audience had begun to splinter, as different members reacted differently to this sudden change in script. There were sounds of anger, fear, confusion, even appreciation.
“Rene,” Avery said, his voice continuing to fragment. It sounded like he was suffering from tuberculosis, and yet his words retained their power, echoing through the speaker and resounding throughout the auditorium. “The serpent that did sting my love now wears my crown.”
Where the ghost’s body was expanding, its arms had remained the same size, now appearing small and vestigial as its torso transformed into the thorax of some strange, glowing insect, the cardboard armor becoming chitin. Heightening the illusion were other arms, each of them ending in other hands, which were pushing their way out between the plates to grasp helplessly at the air.
It was only then that Phoebe realized she was running. Down the aisle along the side of the auditorium, pushing past people who were rising from their seats, realizing that something had gone very wrong. As she ran, she fumbled with the zipper at her jacket pocket.
The ghost of Hamlet’s father now towered nearly the entire distance from stage to rafters, its head no longer bearing any resemblance to Avery, his own face slid backward and flattened to become the skull-mandibles of the ghost. It was reaching several of its many hands toward Luis and, though she knew that whatever she was seeing was just a projection on a piece of plexiglass in front of the stage, she dreaded what would happen if it reached him.
“Adieu, adieu, adieu,” the decaying voice of the great, spectral insect was saying as she managed to pull to zipper open and reach the remote inside. “Remember me.” And then Phoebe hit the button that cut the light in the blue room, and everything went dark.
The wiring of the theater was old and hadn’t been updated since before Phoebe’s time at Dircks. When she shut off the light to the blue room, it must have blown a fuse. That’s what the fire department told them all later. At the time, all anyone knew was that the stage lights went out, the auditorium went dark, and there was suddenly the breathing chaos of a panicked rout as the audience fell into pandemonium.
In the crush and press of bodies that followed, Phoebe was driven back against the wall, the wind knocked from her, the remote for the blue room slapped from her hand and ground to dust beneath trampling feet. Several people were hurt in the stampede to the lobby, where the lights, attached to a different circuit, still burned.
The LEDs in the blue room were battery powered, and in the darkness of the blackened auditorium she could make out their glow around the walls of the orchestra pit. She moved along the wall in that direction, pushing against the flood of people who were leaving their seats and rushing toward the exits. Eventually, she got free of the throng and was standing at the mouth of the pit, looking down into the blue room.
From where she stood, it seemed empty, but Avery, if he was still there, would be farther back, invisible from her angle. Would he be himself? Would he be a giant insect, one far too large to fit into the cramped space beneath the stage? She stood reluctant to find out, the sound of the audience coming apart behind her slowly fading from her awareness as she stepped down into the pit.
It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the glow of the blue LEDs and, when they did, she saw Avery as she had before, slumped in the chair at the far end of the room. He wasn’t moving. One step took her closer, then another. She felt the pills crunch under her feet before she saw them.
It looked like he overdosed. That’s what the EMTs told them. Sleeping pills he’d gotten only a week before, telling the doctor that he couldn’t sleep because of stress related to school, not mentioning his breakup. He had taken all of them that night. The paramedics said he was dead before the curtain ever rose.
Luis quit acting. It wasn’t like his hair had gone shock white after the incident, but it was suddenly gray at the temples, where it had been black as a slick of oil before. He never talked about what he saw, at least not with anyone in the theater department, and when his advisor asked him about dropping the class, he said that he just couldn’t stick with it after what happened to Avery.
What happened to Avery wasn’t the end of it, though. The police came to the theater, first for the mass exodus that had resulted in dozens of injuries severe enough to send people to the hospital in ambulances, then for Avery’s body down in that tight space beneath the stage. “It’s pretty clearly a suicide,” one of the officers told Dr. Gaspard within earshot of Phoebe, “but we’ll probably have to ask a few questions.”
Those questions led them first to Avery’s apartment, then to Rene’s, where they found her lying in bed, strangled. Time of death placed her murder in the early morning hours on the day of the play. She had skin under her nails that they matched to fresh wounds on Avery’s forearms.
It was the last Pepper’s ghost trick that Phoebe ever did.
Originally published in Feisty Felines and Other Fantastical Familiars, edited by Nick Walker and Phil Smith.
