“Maybe,” said JC. “And maybe not. Who knows anything, where the Crowley Project are concerned? Still, I have to wonder if we can expect interference on this mission from some of their field agents.”
“Oh, this gets better all the time,” said Happy. “I can feel one of my funny turns coming on.”
“The Boss would have warned us if there was any danger of confrontation,” said Melody. She stopped and looked up from her precious instruments, a new concern in her face. “Wouldn’t she?”
“You know the Boss,” said JC. “She only ever tells us what she thinks we need to know. So we can concentrate our minds on the matter at hand. But . . . I’m pretty sure she would have told us if there’d been any indication the Crowley Project were involved in the creation of this particular mess. Because it could have a bearing on what we might have to do, to shut it down. So, no . . . I think we can rule out bumping into any Project agents down here, on the grounds that no-one with any working brain-cells would come down here, into the middle of all this, unless they absolutely had to.”
“Good point,” said Happy. “Suddenly, I feel so much more secure. I may even do my happy dance.”
“Please don’t,” said Melody. “Some things are an affront to nature.”
“So, children, let us bend our talents to the matter at hand,” said JC. “All hauntings, no matter how extreme they may become, are the result of a single triggering event. Something specific happens to set everything else in motion. Identify, remove, or defuse that unfortunate beginning, disrupt the pattern, and the haunting will collapse. I don’t see why this mess should be any different, for all its apparent scale. So let’s find the starting point and shut it down; and then we can all go home.”
“You make it sound so simple, and so easy,” said Happy. “And you know perfectly well it never is.”
“Right,” said Melody. “Save the pep talk for new-comers. We know better.”
“Remember when we trapped the Hammersmith Soul Thief in a mirror, last year, then smashed it?” JC said patiently. “That worked out fine, didn’t it? We never heard from him again.”
“Well, yes,” said Happy. “But it still took me ages before I could look into my mirror without expecting to see him standing behind me, peering over my shoulder, and smiling.”
“But it worked,” JC said firmly. “Just like my brilliant gambit at the supermarket, this morning. We can do this, people.”
Happy wouldn’t look at him. “I wish it was that simple, JC. I really do. But there’s something down here with us, and I don’t think we’ve ever met anything like it before. There are . . . Things, Powers, at work in the afterworlds. Some Good, some Bad, some so far beyond us we can’t even hope to understand their motivations and purposes. Sometimes they help us, sometimes they interfere, and sometimes they send us down to Hell with a nudge and a laugh. It isn’t the ghosts we have to fear; it’s the things that make ghosts.”
“Happy, you really are a first-class gloomy bugger,” JC said affectionately. “You could gloom for the Olympics, and still take a Bronze in existential paranoia.”
“Everyone has to be good at something,” said Happy, smiling a little in spite of himself. “But don’t change the subject . . .”
“Happy, you can believe in whatever you want,” said JC, cutting him off with an upraised hand. “As long as it doesn’t get in the way of doing the job. We are not here to take part in some mystic war between Absolute Powers from the Outer Realms. We are here to solve a haunting and put everyone and everything to rest again. That’s what we do.”
“I swear, you two argue like an old married couple,” said Melody. “And it’s interfering with some of my more sensitive instruments. Go take a walk around, check out the other platforms, look for clues or something, and leave me in peace to get on with my work. Stick your phones in your ears, and I’ll give you a yell when I have something definite to tell you.”
JC looked at her carefully. “Are you sure, Melody?”
“Of course I’m sure. Off you go. I can cope.”
JC nodded. “We won’t be long.” He grinned at Happy. “Exploring time! We need to take a look at the other platforms, see if they all feel the same as this. You check out the rest of the southbound lines, and I’ll take the northbound. Keep in touch, and report back here in an hour, whether you’ve found anything or not.”
Happy’s eyes got really big. “Are you kidding? Are you out of your mind? You want me to go wandering around this place on my own?”
“Yes,” said JC. “What’s the matter? You want someone to hold your hand?”
“Yes!” said Happy. “Preferably someone I know.”
“Go,” JC said sternly. “Be a big brave ghost finder, and there’ll be honey for tea.”
He waved one elegant hand around and strolled away, humming a merry tune. Happy made a really vile gesture at JC’s immaculate back, produced a bottle of pills from nowhere, and defiantly dry swallowed three of mother’s little helpers, one after the other. He looked at Melody, but she was making a point of giving all her attention to the equipment ranged before her. Happy sighed, and his shoulders slumped. He shuffled towards the exit arch, like a small boy on his way to school, knowing that the school bully was waiting.
They thought he was scared all the time because he was a coward. The truth was, only he could see the world clearly enough to know how truly scary it was. He saw things and heard things, and every single one of them was real. Horribly real. If Humanity knew what they shared the world with, what walked their streets by day and snuggled up beside them at night; if they could see it all, just for a moment . . . they’d all go stark staring mad. Happy had learned long ago not to talk about it. People didn’t want to know. But he had no choice. If the Boss knew what he faced every day, she’d give him a medal. Or, if she was really feeling kind, a lobotomy. And maybe then he’d get some peace at last.
Ghosts are the only ones who never have to feel scared. Because the worst thing in the world has already happened to them.
* * *
It didn’t take JC long to decide that the whole of the Oxford Circus Tube Station was infected. Everywhere he looked, something looked disturbed, subtly alien. It was hard to judge distances in the unrelentingly fierce light. He walked down one platform for ages, without reaching its end. Eventually he had no choice but to turn around and go back; and there was the exit he’d come in by, waiting for him. Directions become treacherous and signs untrustworthy. The same archway took him to a dozen different places, including one painfully over-bright corridor that twisted and turned like a maze. The angles between floor and wall seemed subtly wrong, and his head ached trying to figure out why. And what shadows there were were very dark.
He particularly didn’t like one tunnel-mouth, at the end of a certain platform. Its interior was too dark, too deep, as though it might go on forever. There was no sound, and not a trace of movement, but still he kept expecting something to come crashing out of the tunnel-mouth at any moment and sweep him helplessly away to somewhere unbearably awful. He made himself stare into the darkness until his breathing steadied and his hands stopped shaking, then he very deliberately turned his back on the tunnel-mouth and walked away, head held high.
Everywhere he went, the tunnels and platforms were full of odd sounds and weird smells, and things glimpsed out of the corner of his eye that were never there when he turned to look at them directly. He kept thinking he caught glimpses of people, turning the corner ahead of him, or peering briefly out of open archways, but they were never there when he arrived. And though he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, there was something subtly wrong about these people that disturbed him strangely on some deep unconscious level.
As though there was something obscurely loathsome about them that he ought to know, ought to recognise. While he still had time.
JC strode up and down the white-tiled corridors, investigated every platform, and made a point of peering into every single tunnel-mouth. The ad
renaline was really buzzing now, and he was grinning widely. He was walking alone, into the face of danger and the heart of the unknown, and he couldn’t have been happier. On every case, he couldn’t wait for the overture to begin, for a chance to come face-to-face with something he’d never seen before. It was the only reason he stayed with the Institute. He couldn’t wait for the supernatural to start its act, reveal its hidden hand, for good or bad, so he could roll up his sleeves and get stuck in. Because once he was actually doing something, he’d be too busy to feel scared.
For all his studiedly calm exterior, JC knew enough about his job to be sensibly cautious. But he also knew, or thought he knew, enough about the situations he faced every day . . . to be pretty sure of what needed doing to put things right. He knew things, had taught himself things, that the rest of his team never knew about, and that the Boss would almost certainly not approve of. JC believed in being prepared, and very heavily armed, at all times; and some of the things he carried in the inner pockets of his marvellous cream suit were officially banned by the Geneva Convention. (Supernatural and Weird Happenings Section.)
He stopped abruptly, half-way down a platform, and looked around. He was almost certain he’d been there before; but everywhere he looked, things seemed subtly different. As though certain details were changing, in slow and sneaky ways, right before his eyes. Someone was playing tricks on him. He walked slowly forward, and the posters on the wall beside him stirred lazily, the details seeming to blur and shimmer, rearranging themselves before his eyes. An ad for the new James Bond movie was suddenly an old propaganda poster from World War II, when whole families huddled together deep in the Underground, sheltering from the bombs of the Blitz. A simple cartoon, backed up by a government admonition to keep your mouth shut in case of spies: Be Like Dad; Keep Mum. The cartoon father-figure turned its simple head and winked an eye at JC. Blood ran from its mouth.
JC reached out to touch the poster, then pulled his hand back again. He had a sudden horrible intuition that it might plunge on into the poster, as though into a deep pool. He made himself walk on, as outwardly casual and unconcerned as ever. The next poster shouted the wares for some new overblown sci-fi epic. As JC watched, the improbable starships, with their blazing energy beams stabbing across the starry night, faded slowly away, revealing instead a stark and brutal poster entitled: What You Should Do in the Case of Sonic Attack. It made scary reading. At the top was a date: 35 October, 2118.
JC kept walking, increasing his pace slightly, glancing at the posters he passed. Scenes seemed to slip and slide, slyly re-creating themselves. Disturbing images clung to the wall, becoming strange windows into unsettling alien worlds and strange dimensions, all of them accompanied by unfamiliar text—the kind of writing you see in dreams, rich and meaningful, packed with a terrible significance and urgent warnings you can’t quite seem to grasp. JC walked faster and faster, wanting to see as much as possible while he could. He was fascinated. What would have unnerved and disturbed lesser men was meat and drink to him.
And yet, at the same time, a small but very real voice insisted on being heard, informing him that the only reason he was so immersed in his work . . . was because he had nothing else in his life he cared about. He never allowed himself to think that out loud. Not even when he lay awake in his single bed, in the early hours of the morning when the dawn seems furthest away . . . when a man’s thoughts turn almost against his will to what he’s made of his life as opposed to what he meant to make of it. When he looks back at his past, and sees nothing to value, or into his future . . . and sees nothing but more of the same. JC had always been a loner, even before the Carnacki Institute found him; and if his work was all he had, it was more than most people had.
He could never have a love in his life, only lovers. Ships that passed in the night and never called afterwards. Because JC could never even hint at what he really did for a living without scaring the other party away. So most of the women who passed through JC’s life said little, kept themselves to themselves, and left no trace behind. There hadn’t been anyone for months . . . but JC couldn’t seem to bring himself to care, much. You can still be lonely even when there’s someone else in the room if she’s not the right kind of someone.
He couldn’t connect with any of the Institute’s female field agents. They were too competitive, or too traumatised, or too haunted . . . there was always something. So JC lived alone and told himself he preferred it that way. He kept himself as busy as possible, so he wouldn’t have to tell himself that too often.
He did love his work. It was fascinating. Always something new.
Genuinely intrigued and delighted, he watched the posters change. His work never let him down.
* * *
Further away from JC than simple distance could account for, Happy went bouncing through empty white-tiled corridors, peering this way and that with wide, wondering eyes. He’d dosed himself with a wide variety of pills, and he was really rocking and rolling by then. There was a spring in his step and iron in his spine, and his thoughts were racing at a thousand miles a second. His experienced brain could handle a dozen conflicting chemistries at once and still know which way was up. Happy was grinning fiercely, his eyes barely blinking at all, and he was waiting for something nasty to show itself, so he could leap on it with loud cries and wrestle it to the ground before giving it a good kicking.
A properly medicated Happy could walk up to a banshee and ask if it knew any show tunes.
His psychic shields were still firmly in place, not even touched by the various chemicals fighting it out for supremacy in his battered grey cells. Happy took drugs to give him an edge, not to hide behind. Or at least, that was what he told himself.
He stopped at an intersection and spun round and round on his toes, his head up as though testing the air, listening for sounds only he could hear. He’d been nagged for some time by a constant feeling there was someone behind him; but no matter how quickly he turned around, there was never anyone there. Happy reined in his raging thoughts with an iron will unsuspected by the rest of his team and stood very still. There was definitely someone, or something, down in the corridors with him. He didn’t need his telepathy to tell him that. He sniffed loudly, giggled briefly, and rubbed his dry hands together. It was times like this he wished he carried a really big gun. Or even a really big stick. With nails in it.
Many people asked, and not a few demanded to know, why Happy needed to take so many pills. A few, with some experience of telepathy, said they understood; but they didn’t, really. Happy only ever took what he needed to make himself brave, smart, or strong enough to be able to do his job properly, so he could strike back at those aspects of the world that had made his life such a misery from an early age.
Revenge is always the best comfort.
At home he ate, slept, and watched television, just like anybody else. Drugged himself with the routine and the ordinary and the everyday. He couldn’t afford to be doped up all the time. Couldn’t afford to bliss out and dream his life away. Because Happy knew what else lived in the world alongside the rest of us. He needed to be prepared. Because you never knew when something might be sneaking up on you from behind.
No friends, no lovers, no love. Because he could never share his world with anyone. It wouldn’t be fair.
Happy looked around, and the corridors stretched away in every direction, impossibly long, openly threatening. Happy laughed out loud and clapped his hands together, the sound almost shockingly loud in the quiet.
“You can’t get me!” said Happy, in a loud breathy voice. “You can’t even touch me because I’m not really here. I’m armoured up, and ninety degrees from reality, far beyond your reach. So come on out and give me your best shot; and I’ll laugh right in your face. How do you like them apples, Casper?”
The corridors lay open and silent before him, but Happy knew someone was listening. Checking him out, from a distance. Happy wondered what it made of him and his altered state of co
nsciousness. Maybe it was scared of him. That would be fun. Ghosts were quite simple things, really; if they couldn’t scare you, they were usually lost for an alternative. So Happy set off down the nearest corridor, full of chemical good cheer and hardly shaking at all, medicinally armed against anything the unknown could throw at him.
Happy liked to think of himself as the last of the Untouchables.
* * *
Back on the southbound platform, Melody struggled with her precious equipment, trying through expert intimidation and sheer force of personality to make the damned things do what they were supposed to. She bent over the computer keyboards, staring right into the monitor screens, coaxing and cursing them in the same half-conscious murmur. Melody dealt in hard facts and felt helpless and vulnerable without them. She’d approached the Carnacki Institute in the first place because all her researches had convinced her that only the Institute could provide her with answers to questions no-one else would even discuss. She’d hoped for a nice quiet life in some nice quiet Institute Library; instead, they made her a field agent and sent her out into the world to find her own answers. Typically, her experiences in the field had only provided her with a whole new set of questions.
Still, her position did give her access to cutting-edge, state-of-the-art technology, and that made up for a lot. The instruments ranged before her could break down and analyse events and energies that most scientists wouldn’t even admit existed. Of course, that wasn’t enough for Melody Chambers. She didn’t only want to know what existed in the hidden corners of the world; she wanted, needed, to understand how they worked and why. Melody hated a mystery.
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