Joshua Joy: Ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys! Have we got a show for you tonight. A once-in-a-lifetime show! Amaze your ears, astonish your eyes, then run along home and tell your friends and neighbors. A once-in-a-lifetime show. Never to be forgotten for the rest of your lives. So why not step inside? We’re waiting for you.
Owen: Do you recognize any of your long lost relatives, Gwen? There’s Auntie Peggy, she’s on the gin again.
Ianto: Can you be quiet?
Ianto: When the film stopped these… shadows went past me.
Jack: What kind of shadows?
Ianto: Don’t know. Wasn’t clear. Something else: you were up there on the screen. Large as life.
Jack: What was I doing?
Ianto: You were on some sort of a stage. Inside a big tent. You seemed to be part of a travelling show.
Jack: I heard it. Heard its music. Just a snatch of it. That film was beautiful.
Ianto: All those acts performing for us. Part of history, trapped on film forever.
Jack: Their days were numbered. Cinema may have saved their images but it finished off the travelling shows. Killed them.
I’ve been compiling old footage of Hope Street and the Electro for opening night. But the circus clips weren’t on it, I swear.
Jack: So the film that was shown wasn’t meant to be here?
No. And that’s what’s so scary. I mean, it kind of played itself. It’s like it wanted to be seen.
Jack: Like something was trying to get through.
Jack: What’s wrong?
Owen: She’s got a heartbeat but she isn’t breathing. Shouldn’t really be alive. And look at her mouth. She’s got no saliva. Lips cracked, dry as a bone.
Pearl: Make her cry. I want to drink her tears.
Owen: Right, now I’ve seen everything.
Ianto: I told you so.
Gwen: You did stand-up.
Jack: I never did stand-up.
Gwen: Okay then. A song and dance.
Jack: I was sensational!
Tosh: I don’t believe this, Jack. What were you doing there?
Owen: He’s part of this freakshow.
Jack: Yeah. Something’s never change.
Owen: You being rude about me? Look at the state of ’em.
Gwen: But I do love his leotard.
Jack: The Night Travellers.
Tosh: The what?
Jack: Tosh, play that back. So they did exist.
Tosh: Did you work with these people?
Jack: I didn’t work with them. I never knew anyone who did. They only performed in the dead of night. Anyway, it was just a tale that was around at that time. A ghost story. They came from out of the rain. That’s how people described them.
Owen: So what did these night travellers do?
Jack: Left a trail of damage and sorrow wherever they performed.
Tosh: So what are we saying? That two people from a piece of film have decided to go AWOL?
Jack: Ianto, with me. I need your local knowledge.
Gwen: Oh! Is that what you’re calling it these days?
Ianto: They were left forgotten on pieces of film.
Jack: And now they’re looking for a new audience.
Christina: Your eyes are older than your face.
Jack: Is that a bad thing?
Christina: Yes.
Gwen: These disappearances, there’s a lot of Old Wives Tales attached to them through the years. People still alive but being deprived of breath, children being told to hold their breath while a travelling show passes by.
Owen: Yeah, this local paper didn’t take it seriously.
Jonathan: There’s that smell again. Like chemicals.
Ianto: Yeah, I can smell it. Like when you develop a film.
Jonathan: That woman. She grabbed me. But her hand, it was different. It wasn’t like a hand. It wasn’t like flesh. It was it was like touching a piece of plastic, a piece of celluloid.
Jack: They were on this film for 80 years. Became part of it. What if we filmed them?
Ianto: A film of a film?
Jack: Yeah. Then they’d be trapped. Is this thing loaded?
Joshua Joy: What are you? There’s not a breath in your poor, sad body. You’re no use to me.
Jack: Those reels of film in Jonathan’s workroom—
Ianto: I took them out, destroyed them. Let’s hope that’s an end to it.
Jack: What worries me are all those long lost pieces of film, tucked away in dusty cellars, hidden in lofts. The night travellers could still be there, somewhere. Just waiting.