The lock is still stuffed with a thin shard of plastic fork. No way can you put in a key.

“Last night,” Mr. Whittier says, and he shakes the key in the air, “your friendly ghost picked the lock clean. I assure you, it works fine.”

All of us, we're still sitting in our circle, some of us stuck to the stage boards by our own dried blood. Our clothes, the fabric of our gowns and cassocks and jodhpurs, it glues us to the spot.

Mr. Whittier leans down a little to offer his hand to Miss Sneezy, and he says, “And the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all . . .” Wiggling his fingers for her to take, he says, “Shall we go now?”

And she doesn't take the hand. Miss Sneezy says, “We saw you die . . .”

And Mr. Whittier says, “You've seen a lot of people die.”

The dried-turkey Tetrazzini split his stomach from the inside. He died screaming. We wrapped his dead body in red velvet and carried him to the subbasement.

“Not quite,” Mr. Whittier says. With Mrs. Clark's help, they faked his death so he could watch events run their course. All he did was watch—the last camera—even when Mrs. Clark died, stabbing herself for sympathy—but doing too good a job. Even when Director Denial found the body and ate half a leg. All Mr. Whittier did was watch.

Director Denial lifts her head from her chest. She belches and says, “He's right.”

Again, Mr. Whittier stoops to offer his spotted hand to Miss Sneezy. He says, “I can give you all the love you want. If you can overlook our difference in age.”

Her being twenty-two. Him being thirteen—fourteen next month.

The Earl of Slander says, “You're not going to rescue us. We're staying here until we're found.”

We always do this, Mr. Whittier says. For the same reason our children's children's children's children will always have war and famine and disease. Because we love our pain. We love our drama. But we will never, ever admit that.

Miss Sneezy reaches to take the hand.

And Mother Nature says, “Don't be stupid.” From her pile of rags and hair, she says, “He knows you're infected with that . . . brain virus.” She laughs, her brass bells ringing, and scabs everywhere, and she says, “How can you possibly believe he really loves you?”

Miss Sneezy looks from the Mother to the Saint to Mr. Whittier's hand.

“You have no choice,” Mr. Whittier tells her. “If you need to be loved.”

And Saint Gut-Free says, “He doesn't love you.” The Saint, his face is nothing but teeth and eyes as he says, “Whittier only wants to destroy the rest of the world.”

Still reaching toward Miss Sneezy, Mr. Whittier shakes the key in his other hand, saying, “Shall we go?”

If we can forgive what's been done to us . . .

If we can forgive what we've done to others . . .

If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being villains or victims.

Only then can we maybe rescue the world.

But we still sit here, waiting to be saved. While we're still victims, hoping to be discovered while we suffer.

Shaking his head, clucking his tongue, Mr. Whittier says, “Would it be so bad? To be the last two people in the world?” His hand slips around, wraps around, tight around Miss Sneezy's limp fingers, and Mr. Whittier says, “Why can't the world end the same way it started?” And he pulls Miss Sneezy to her feet.

Proof

Another Poem About Mr. Whittier

“How would you live?” asks Mr. Whittier.

If you could not die.

Mr. Whittier onstage, he stands straight,

on two feet, not stooped.

Not trembling.

The stereo earphones looped around his neck,

leaking loud drum-and-bass music.

Both feet in tennis shoes, the laces untied and one foot

tapping.

Onstage, instead of a movie fragment, a spotlight,

not a fragment of some old story projected to hide him.

A spotlight shines so hard it erases his wrinkles.

Washes away his age spots.

And, watching him, we were God's children he held hostage, to make God show

Himself.

To force God's hand.

And if we suffered enough, if we died . . . if Whittier could just torture us,

starve us,

maybe we would hate him from even beyond this life.

Hate him so much, we'd come back for revenge.

If we died in enough pain, cursing old Mr. Whittier, then he begged for us to come back.

To haunt him.

To give him proof of a life after death.

Our ghosts, our hate would prove the Death of Death.

Our role, when he finally told us: We were only here to suffer and suffer,

and suffer and suffer,

and suffer and die.

To create just one ghost—fast.

To comfort old, old dying Mr. Whittier—before he died.

That was his real plan.

Leaning over us, he says, “If death meant just leaving the stage long enough

to change costume and come back

as a new character . . .

Would you slow down? Or speed up?

If every life is just a basketball game or a play that begins and ends

while the players go on to new games, new productions . . .

In the face of that fact, how would you live?

Dangling the key between two fingers, Mr. Whittier says, “You can stay here.”

But when you die, then come back

just for a moment.

To tell me. To save me. With proof of our eternal life.

To save us all,

please, tell someone.

To create real peace on earth.

Let us all be—

Haunted.

Obsolete

A Story by Mr. Whittier

For their last family vacation, Eve's dad herded them all into the car and said to get comfortable. This trip could take a couple hours, maybe more.

They had snacks, cheese popcorn and cans of soda and barbecue potato chips. Eve's brother, Larry, and she sat in the back seat with their Boston terrier, Risky. In the front seat, her dad turned the key to start the engine. He turned the ventilation to high and opened all the electric windows. Sitting next to him, Eve's future ex-stepmom, Tracee, said, “Hey, kids, listen to this . . .”

Tracee waved a government pamphlet called It's Great to Emigrate. She flipped it open, bending the spine backward to crack it, and started to read out loud. “Your blood uses hemoglobin,” she read, “to carry oxygen molecules from your lungs to the cells in your heart and brain.”

Maybe six months ago, everybody got this same pamphlet in the mail from the Surgeon General. Tracee slipped her feet out of her sandals and put her toes up on the dashboard. Still reading out loud, she said, “Hemoglobin actually prefers to bond with carbon monoxide.” The way she talked, as if her tongue were too big, it was supposed to make her sound girly. Tracee read, “As you breathe car exhaust, more and more of your hemoglobin combines with carbon monoxide, becoming what's called carboxyhemoglobin.”

Larry was feeding cheese popcorn to Risky, getting the bright-orange cheese powder all over the car seat between him and Eve.

Her dad switched on the radio, saying, “Who wants music?” He looked at Larry in the rearview mirror and said, “You're going to make that dog sick.”

“Great,” Larry said, and fed Ricky another piece of bright-orange popcorn. “The last thing I'll see is the inside of the garage door, and the last song I'll hear will be something by the Carpenters.”

But there's nothing to hear. There's been nothing on the radio for a week.

Poor Larry, poor goth rocker Larry, with black makeup smeared around his white-powdered face, his fingernails painted black and his long stringy hair dyed black, compared to real people with their eyes pecked out by birds, real dead people with their lips peeling back from their big dead teeth, compared to real death, Larry could just be a really sad-faced clown.