Such as Dreams Are Made Of
By Marie Brennan

olt closed his cell phone, the soft click swallowed up by the cool grey carpet, and smiled to himself. His next deal was well underway, even as he stood in the monument of his latest achievement. The room that would become his office was empty still, the furniture not yet delivered, but he wasn't unduly impatient. Corner-cutting and well-placed bribes had finished this office tower ahead of schedule and under budget. After years of this work, Holt was a master of his art.

He enjoyed the challenge of it, more than the result. Construction could be interesting, but the true sport was in the negotiations, buying out properties for redevelopment. The craft market that had once stood here was the hardest battle he'd fought yet, pitting him against a neighborhood association that wanted to save the old two-story building with its gaudy mural walls from the forces of modern urban planning. A year and a half before, he won that one. But now, the craft market was only a memory, and, ultimately, even less than that. That was why he'd chosen to move his office here. There were few things more satisfying than staking out territory in a conquered land.

Holt smiled to himself and straightened his suit, taking one last look around before turning off the light and exiting into the hall.

He pulled up short as a man almost ran into him. "Watch where you're—" Holt began.

He never got to the last word before a fist crashed into his head.

*          *          *

"See for yourself." The cop gestured for Holt to watch the clip.

Scowling, Holt dragged his flimsy chair forward until it was right in front of the TV. He would see for himself. If this cop was too incompetent to do his job, Holt would do it for him.

He blessed the luck that had gotten the building's security cameras installed just two days before. No one had seen the thug who attacked him exiting the building; at that late hour, not many people were around. The eye of technology, though, was always watching.

The empty hallway flickered up onto the screen. Holt focused on it, glancing at all the corners of the image, looking for a tell-tale shadow that might give away the bastard's hiding place.

He saw no shadows. But after a few seconds of the unchanging image, he saw the door to his office open, saw himself step into the hall. His image scowled and mouthed a few words.

Then he staggered backward, hit the wall, and slid down it to land in a crumpled heap on the floor.

And through it all, there was no one else in the hall.

The cop rewound the tape without being asked. Holt watched it again, lips pressed together. He saw himself fall at no visible hand. He could not tear his eyes away from the sight of his body lying on the floor, a heap of expensively tailored suit and unresponsive flesh.

"You see why we're confused," the cop said. "You claim to have been attacked by a man you ran into in the hall. But there's nobody on the tape. Unless he's invisible?"

Holt glared at him. "I doubt that," he said icily. "There were a number of people who opposed my buyout of that property. Perhaps one of them doctored the tape."

"We'll look into it," the cop said, but his voice reeked of skepticism.

"Do you think I'm lying?" Holt demanded. "I didn't hit myself in the head. And I'm not faking this. Ask the doctor who treated me."

"We did." The cop flipped his folder open and scanned a sheet of paper inside. "The doctor found no contusion on your head. No bruise."

"I know what a contusion is," Holt snapped.

The cop continued without batting an eyelash at the outburst. "He says here that maybe your experience took place inside your own brain. A chemical imbalance, which made you hallucinate and then black out."

Holt slapped his hand down onto the table. "I do not use drugs. My blood tests will prove that."

"We're not accusing you of anything. The problem could be natural."

The words took a moment to sink in. When they did, Holt's blood turned to ice. "A tumor?"

"You'll have to discuss that with the doctor." The cop stood. "Call us if you remember anything else that might be of use. Or if anything else happens."

"Like another attack."

"Yes." The cop's eyes gave nothing away. He would have made a good businessman.

When the cop was gone, Holt sat back and closed his eyes. His blood had not yet warmed up again, leaving him cold all through.

That man hadn't been a hallucination. He'd been too vivid, too immediately there. Granted, the fellow had looked peculiar, with his bright clothing all shredded and stained, hanging in rags off his bony frame, but if Holt had been seeing things, why had he imagined a man? Why not something stranger?

Holt thought of the man's furious presence, and retracted that thought. He had been stranger. And frightening, too, his eyes reflecting the light until they seemed to glow.

A tumor, or else simple madness.

Holt wasn't sure which possibility scared him more.

*          *          *

Work. That was what he needed. Work would distract him from the empty hallway, from the appointment for a CAT scan in three days' time. He spent most of the next day in his office, piling work on his secretary until she was too busy to make timid suggestions that he go home and rest. He didn't need rest; he needed distraction.

He needed reassurance, confirmation that his world was still under his control. Holt got in his car and drove across the city, to look over the site of his next triumph.

The theatre's walls rose around him, claustrophobically close. The place seated barely three hundred. Holt walked down the aisle, looking from side to side at the old seats with their carved wooden frames and worn velvet cushions. They would be sold off before the building was demolished. He couldn't imagine who would want one. The velvet bred dust, and probably harbored insects.

He arrived at the stage and stopped there, looking up at the heavy curtain of crimson velvet, bordered by ugly carvings covered in flaking gilt paint. They looked like termites had been chewing on them. This place would probably fall down on its own in another ten years, even without his help.

"Please—do not do it."

Holt spun, immediately on the defensive. But the speaker wasn't the man who had attacked him; it was a woman. A tiny thing, almost child-like, clothed in some kind of antique brocade dress that matched the theatre's decor. An actress, he supposed. The tension went out of his muscles. Were they putting on one last play, before the building fell?

"I suppose your fellow actors sent you to plead with me," Holt said, straightening. She would barely come up to his collarbone, if she stood next to him.

She shook her head. Curls tumbled around her shoulders with the motion. Whoever had nominated her as their spokeswoman obviously didn't know Holt. He believed in reasoned arguments and money, not big-eyed waifs. "I was not sent," she said.

Holt shrugged. "Doesn't matter. Whatever you have to say, I don't want to hear it."

He moved to pass her and leave the building, but she stood in his way. "Please," she repeated. "Why do you need to destroy this playhouse? There are other places you could build."

"There are other places you could perform," Holt countered. "The new Arts Center seats two thousand."

"It's huge," the woman said, as if the adjective tasted bad. "No intimacy."

"But much more revenue." Why was he even wasting his time talking to her? Why hadn't he left already? She couldn't stop him.

Holt realized with a sudden chill that he didn't want to go near her, as he would have to in order to continue up the aisle. He could cross to a different aisle, but that would make him look scared. And he refused to run from a woman half his size, no matter how unnerving her eyes were.

He steeled himself and shoved past her.

He was almost to the lobby when she spoke again. "He should not have attacked you."

Holt whirled. She still stood in the aisle, hands folded neatly across her brocaded skirt. He stared at her, grasping for words, and finally growled, "Tell him to stay away from me. Far away." He would tell the police to follow her. She might lead them to the man.

"For what he did, you have my apology," she said. "I told him it would do no good."

"It'll get him in jail," Holt snarled.

She shook her head. "No. But he cares not for reason; his tragedy has left him insensible to all but rage." Her eyes were sad, but she stared unwaveringly at Holt, and he refused to look away. He wouldn't let her cow him. "Many are angry. Some agree with him, and say that to do a great right, we must do a little wrong."

Fury made Holt tremble. "Don't threaten me, bitch. I'll see you locked up. All of you. The police are onto your friend, and you can bet I'll tell them about you, too."

She did not look frightened, or even taken aback. Just sad. And now, a touch amused as well. "What will you tell them?" she asked. "That you were threatened by a ghost?"

Then she vanished.

*          *          *

When the call came, Holt almost refused. But the theatre manager was adamant: if his building was going to be torn down, he was going to spend as much of his remaining time there as he could. The meeting had to be in his office.

Holt didn't want to go, didn't want to set foot anywhere near that building. Not since the CAT scan had come back clean. There was nothing wrong with his brain—nothing that could explain what he had seen.

Which left only the possibility that he was going mad.

And if anyone else found out about it . . . the field he worked in was cutthroat. The slightest hint of weakness, the merest doubt as to his competence, and his career would be over. Hallucinations might as well be a death sentence.

But the manager insisted, until Holt grew disgusted with his own timidity. What could a wisp like that woman do to him? She was probably the ghost of some actress who had died on stage. She probably couldn't even leave the hall. The building's offices weren't her kind of territory.

She wasn't even real.

So Holt went.

The manager wanted to show him a petition, of all things. A bunch of signatures under a little paragraph of quasi-legal babble asking him to leave the theatre standing. Holt scanned it and tossed it back onto the desk. "Names don't move me, Mr. Wharton."

The manager's face was white and strained. "There are over—"

"I don't care how many there are. This is valuable property, and it could be much more productively developed. The owner agrees."

"Because you offered him ten times as much money." Red was creeping up Wharton's neck to his face.

Holt smiled. This was familiar territory. "Exactly. Meet my offer, and then we might have something to talk about."

"You know we can't."

"Yes." Holt's smile widened.

The manager glared at him. "This isn't over, Mr. Holt. This building is nearly a hundred years old; it's quite an important place. We're working to get it classified as a historical landmark."

Ah. Holt had been wondering if the man would think of this particular tactic. "I wish you luck, Mr. Wharton, but such designations take a terribly long time to go through." He'd have the deal closed long before then, and the building reduced to so much historical rubble.

"We're appealing to a judge to have the deal postponed."

Interesting. Holt might actually have to do something about this. It all depended on who the judge was. There were a few who owed him favors. "You're welcome to try."

Wharton stood. "Wait here, Mr. Holt. I want to show you something."

Holt didn't bother to hide his impatience. "Be quick. I dislike wasting my time."

The manager growled as if he wanted to respond to that but could find no decent answer. Once the man left the office, Holt smiled again. He loved a good fight.

"He wasn't always like that, you know."

Holt leapt out of his chair. She was there, without warning, without coming through the damn door. She sat—no, perched on the edge of a row of filing cabinets. Her antique dress ought to have been terribly out of place among the steel furniture and computers. But her presence forced Holt's awareness beyond those trappings to what lay behind: the office, its walls and floor and ceiling, with old wooden beams and whitewashed plaster in between, all a part of the same building that housed the stage. Nearly a hundred years old. She fit in just fine. It was the modern material that didn't belong. And try though he might to deny her reality, his efforts disintegrated when faced with her presence.

"Not the manager," she continued, unfazed by Holt's violent movement. "The other. We change, you see, as the buildings do. And if they are destroyed too soon—" Her eyes were grim, and sad. "That way madness lies."

Holt tugged his suit straight and pulled himself together. "And why should I care?"

She looked at him with her disquieting eyes. "You have come within the measure of our wrath."

"You can't do anything to me," Holt said, putting more confidence behind it than he felt. "You're dead."

A smile flickered across her doll-like face. "I am not dead."

He stared at her. A terrible suspicion welled up in him, that he'd been played for a fool. "You said you were a ghost."

She looked apologetic. "I . . . misspoke. For the sake of rhetorical force. It's a failing many theatre people have."

Holt was hardly listening. Not a ghost. In which case—

He lunged forward and seized her wrist. His fingers closed around birdlike bones and soft skin. She looked amused, and for a moment he wanted to fling her into a wall, just to wipe the look off her face.

He settled for dragging her toward the office door. Whatever smoke-and-mirrors trick she and her friends had pulled the other day, she'd have trouble managing it with him holding onto her.

Which was a fine plan as far as it went, but then her wrist melted out of his grasp.

She didn't pull free. She didn't break his hold. She simply wasn't there anymore. Holt's fingers suddenly came together, with nothing inside. He turned and found her standing behind him. She gave a little shrug that might have been an apology.

"Not a ghost," she said. "But I never said I was human."

He turned to bolt for the door and there she was, blocking his way. She hadn't walked there. She stared at him with her unnatural eyes, and for a moment he saw lightning flicker in them, deep inside. Not human at all.

"Will you not leave my playhouse alone?" she asked.

Holt staggered back until he hit his chair.

She glided toward him, delicate and terrifying, a symptom of his madness—and yet she felt so real—

Holt took refuge in what he knew: stubbornness. "No."

She was close now, and her tiny size belied the presence that filled the whole room—the whole building. "This is my place," she said, speaking with clear, cold enunciation, and he believed it. "I will not let you destroy it."

The door behind her opened, and she vanished.

Holt shoved past Wharton without a word, ignoring the papers the man tried to put into his hand. He had to get out of the building. Had to get away from her, back to where things made sense. Back to reality.

He managed to walk to the outside door. A fast walk, but a walk. Then, once outside, Holt ran for his car.

*          *          *

He slept—if it could be called sleep. He drifted in and out, never quite awake, never quite asleep, despite the pills he'd taken. When he was alert enough to know he was awake, he was angry. He had let an incorporeal slip of a woman—not even a woman!—put him to flight. A mere fancy of the imagination. She couldn't possibly exist. The stress of his job had cracked him at last, and he had gone mad.

But he couldn't make himself believe it. He wasn't imagining her.

That thought, which sat so uncomfortably in his mind, brought him awake.

Thunder was rumbling uneasily outside, disturbing his attempts at sleep. Holt's tossing and turning had left most of the sheets hanging off the sides of the bed. He sat up to retrieve them—and saw it.

The street lamp outside cast just enough light to reveal the figure standing at the foot of the bed. Holt opened his mouth to order the intruder out, but no words came. A presence filled the room, making the very walls pulse. A cold presence, possessed of an unblinking regard that pinned Holt to his bed like a moth on a card. The figure was thin to the point of emaciation, stick-like, mere bones wrapped in skin. It was roughly human, but consisted of angles and lengths that were not quite right. In size it was neither child nor adult, and it showed no hint of gender.

Holt didn't have to be told that it was another one of them. The way his skin was crawling made that quite plain.

But he was damned if he'd let them intimidate him here. This was his place; they had no right to intrude on him. Holt cleared his throat and glared at the figure. "Get out," he said. Just that, nothing more. His brain tried to formulate a tirade, but inspiration withered and died under the thing's stare.

Part of him still insisted the creature could not be there. The apartment building was full of wealthy young professionals, mostly unmarried; there were no children. No one so silly and irrational as to believe in a creature like this. How could it possibly live here, in such an atmosphere?

It didn't live here. It was here. This place.

Just as she was the playhouse . . .

. . . and the other one was—had been—the craft market.

Holt could not tear his eyes away from the thing at the end of his bed. It stood, watching him, and he wondered if it too would attack him. And if so, how he could possibly defend himself.

Lightning flashed, bleaching the room bone-white and forcing Holt's eyes shut. When he opened them, the spirit was gone.

*          *          *

The theatre's front door was unlocked, even though it was the middle of the night. He found her inside, standing on the stage. The heavy curtains had been drawn back, and a single light shone down on her, making the curls of her hair into a golden halo. Holt stood in the aisle, dripping rainwater onto the threadbare carpet, and glared at her.

"That thing. Did you send it after me?"

She shook her head. "It was always there. Once you were blind, but now you see. Did it bother you?" Her voice carried a mocking edge. "You made it, you realize."

"I—"

She stopped Holt's denial before he could form it. "All of you, who live in that place. Frozen and harsh. But not soulless, no—only a very new building lacks a spirit. But the one you made for that place is twisted. Unhappy. Like you."

"I'm perfectly happy."

"You are cold. Heartless. Without love. Some who live there are different, but many are like you, and together you made what you saw." Holt saw pity in her eyes, but it was not for him. She grieved for that monster, the one she said he had made.

"Don't go blaming me for that thing," he growled. "I never asked for any of you to exist."

"You don't get to ask," she said. The advantage of height the stage had given her made her tiny body imposing. All around him he could feel the theatre's walls, strong despite their age and worn appearance, strong with her power. They would not fail until she did, and she showed no sign of weakness. "Do you think you could live, work, dream, and it would have no effect?" She spread her arms wide, as if taking the entire theatre into her embrace. "We are such stuff as dreams are made of. From the elderly man who funded the raising of this playhouse out of his private fortune and his love of theatre, to the boy who sweeps the stage after the curtain has fallen and everyone has gone home, who looks out at the empty seats and dreams of glory and art—they have made me, all unknowing. That boy weeps for me, and for himself, because he thinks that I must leave him."

"Yes, and it's all my fault," Holt said nastily. "All of it, from that creature in my room to your untimely demise. You're this building? This building is a hundred years old. You're out of date, bitch. The world has moved on, and it's left you behind."

"As it left him behind?" She turned and began to walk across the front of the stage, casual as an actress giving a soliloquy. "You should have seen him, when the craft market still stood. He would caper about like a jester, giving flowers to ladies and sweets to children. He made them laugh."

"How do I stop seeing you?" Holt demanded. "How do I make you leave me alone?"

She turned, a slow pivot that brought her around until she faced him squarely. "Leave us alone."

Holt snorted. "I have a living to make. And I'm good at what I do."

"Indeed, you are Covetousness incarnate. You wish to turn this playhouse into gold that you might lock it up in your chest." Her voice carried a razor-sharp edge of bitterness. "You craft most foul and unnatural murder."

Murdering her was sounding more pleasant by the second. "I’m looking forward to closing you down. I'll come watch the demolition, just to be sure you're really gone." Would it send her mad, as it had the other one? Holt found himself hoping it would. Anger gave him courage. He didn't fear her. He didn't fear any of them.

As if she could read his mind, a smile ghosted across her painted lips. "Of course you should not fear us. We are but daggers of the mind, false creations, begot of nothing but vain fantasy. What can such as we do to you?"

Her words only confirmed Holt's own thoughts, but something in them, a mocking tone almost too faint to hear, choked off his growing feeling of confidence. He stared at her, and she smiled back.

He whirled, but there was no one else in the room. No one sneaking up on him. Then why was she smiling? "They will not come here," she said. "No one will. We are bound to our places."

But she spoke of the others as if she knew them. "You talk to each other," he said, looking at her.

Her smile grew a whimsical twist. "How else are we to pass the quiet hours, when we stand empty and alone?"

They talked to each other. And she was smiling as if she knew something he didn't.

"We have a speech of fire that fain would blaze," she said. The humour had leached out of her voice, leaving her grim and cold, and the lightning was in her eyes. "You will hear it anon."

Holt spun and ran for the exit.

She was standing there, in front of the door to the lobby, but he charged up the aisle toward her anyway. Corporeal or not, he would get past her. He had to get out of here.

"The bright day is done," she said as he approached. "We are for the dark, and may do such bitter business as the day would quake to look on."

A heartbeat before he would have crashed into her, she vanished.

*          *          *

He felt eyes on him as he drove through the streets, as if the buildings were watching him. Holt felt the force of all the spirits, all the personalities accumulated by years of habitation and dreaming. He drove faster and faster through the night-time streets, slick with rain, and tried to ignore them all.

Despite his speed, the fire trucks beat him there.

The office building was doomed by the time Holt arrived. Three fire trucks were lined up outside, and a fourth screeched in as he pulled to a stop, but their sprays had hardly any effect. Nearly all twenty stories were on fire; they wouldn't be able to salvage much. Years of work were going up in smoke.

An ambulance was parked off to the left. Paramedics stood around it, idle as the firemen were not. This was not an apartment building; there was no one to rescue. A police officer was with them. Holt headed for him.

"What happened?" he shouted as he came close.

The cop glanced at him. "Are you the owner of this building?"

"I oversaw its construction."

"Your name, sir?"

"Holt. What happened to the building?"

A gurney rolled past as he asked the question. Holt's eyes shot to it, but the occupant was covered in a sheet from head to toe. "Who's that?" he demanded.

"A homeless man appears to have been sleeping in the building when it went up," the cop said.

Fury brought blood surging up into Holt's face. So this was their revenge. The spirit of the craft market had set fire to the office building. Lucky for him he'd died in the flames; Holt would have killed him, otherwise. "Arson," he snarled.

"Doesn’t look like it, Mr. Holt," the cop said. "We think it's an electrical fire. There'll be an investigation, of course, once the flames have died down, but that seems the most likely cause." He flipped a notebook open and fished a pen out of his pocket. "You say you were involved with the building's construction? I'll need your address and phone number, and the name of the contractor you hired for the wiring."

Holt smiled through gritted teeth. This wasn't anything he couldn't handle. Easy enough to place the blame on the electrical contractor, as if he hadn't known all along that the man was cutting corners. A bit of suspicion would attach to Holt, but that was fine. They hadn't stopped him.

Holt took the cop's notebook and wrote down his contact information. The building was a loss, yes, but he would come out of the situation all right.

And then he'd go after that bitch and her "playhouse."

*          *          *

He came home in the chill hours before dawn, more than ready to sleep. Another storm was rolling in, but no amount of thunder could keep him awake at this point. The adrenaline had long since worn off, leaving him cold and tired.

Holt let himself into the apartment, hung up his coat, and walked into the living room.

It was waiting for him.

The stick-like figure stood just a pace or two away. Its dead eyes held fragments of the lightning that split the sky outside. Holt had a vision of leaping forward, taking that brittle body in his hands and breaking it until it could no longer stand and look at him with those horrible eyes.

He had the vision, but he could not do it.

Who was to say this building could not suffer its own "electrical fire"? With him in it?

The thing in front of him raised its hand, and to his bone-deep shame Holt flinched as if struck. But the creature did not move toward him.

There was something in its hand.

Papers.

Holt recognized them. Files taken from the desk in his apartment office. The letterhead on the front one was identifiable even in the unpredictable illumination of the lightning. It was a proposal for an upcoming project.

The papers burst into flame.

The thing holding them did not flinch even as embers began to float free, drifting down to scorch its hand and arm. It held the burning sheaf there, in front of Holt, keeping his eyes riveted to the destruction.

Files. Just files. But the message was clear.

Anything he built, they would destroy. Maybe not electrical fires every time; maybe the windows would loosen and fall, or the foundation would crack. Different flaws, but adding up. Everything he did from now on, they would know about, and there would be nothing he could do to guard himself against them. One "accident" he could handle without losing his career, but not a dozen.

They wouldn't kill him. They would just ruin him. Completely.

Holt did move then, and screamed, and threw himself at the creature standing before him. But it was gone the moment he moved, and he fell to his knees in the cinders, left alone amidst the ashes of his future.