“Oh, that old thing. I’ve had that spell in my repertory for years. Never leave home without it.”
Erik sniggered. “Now tell them what you had to do to acquire that spell. And what you did with the blood afterwards.”
“They don’t need to know that!” snapped Natasha. “It would only upset them. Why do you always have to spoil everything?”
Erik shrugged. “Stick to what you’re best at, that’s what I always say.”
Melody ignored them all. She didn’t approve of magic. She busied herself with her equipment, checking the most recent displays and frowning intently at the long-range sensor readings. All her instrument panels were lit up, blazing fiercely as new information flooded in. Melody stabbed fiercely at one keyboard after another, scowling at each monitor screen in turn, reluctant to admit she didn’t understand half of what her machines were telling her. Energy readings everywhere were off the scale, spiking and changing and disappearing even as she looked at them. Some of what she was seeing made no sense at all, as though the very laws of reality were becoming slippery and unreliable under the influence of some monstrous Outside will.
Tunnels, platforms, corridors—the whole station was crawling with unnatural manifestations. Ghosts, demons, other-dimensional creatures; some of them so strange, so alien, they barely qualified as life-forms at all. Life and Death weren’t as separate as they used to be, down in the Underground.
“Stop frowning like that, Melody,” said JC. “You’ll give yourself wrinkles. What’s up?”
“Do you want the bad news, the really bad news, or the Oh we are truly fucked this time news?” said Melody. “If I’m interpreting these readings correctly, and I am, we’re in enemy territory now. Something from way beyond the fields we know or even guess at, has come among us, and is reworking the most basic laws of our reality. Writing over the world, to make it more like where the Intruder originally came from.”
“All right,” said Happy, “you’ve got my attention. Are you sure about this, Melody? The sheer power involved would . . .”
“Of course I’m not sure!” snapped Melody. “I’ve never seen readings like this! I doubt anyone has. But I am definitely seeing massive displays of other-dimensional energy, more than enough to transmute matter. Something from the afterworlds has forced open a door into our reality, settled in, and established a beachhead. Part of this Intruder has manifested in our world, taken shape and form, and rooted itself here; and more is coming through all the time. Or, if you prefer, downloading its information into our material plane, and just its presence is enough to mould the world around it. The Intruder is more . . . real, than us. And it’s not hiding any more. As though it wants us to know where it is, and what it’s doing. As though it wants us to come and find it.”
“As if we’d fall for an obvious trap like that,” said Happy. “We’re not going to fall for an obvious trap like that, are we? Oh shit, we are. I want to go home.”
He fumbled a bottle of pills out of an inside pocket, but his hands were trembling so much he spilled most of them on the floor. He got down on his knees and scrabbled for the scattered pills. He was shaking all over, and his mouth trembled as though he might burst into tears at any moment. Natasha looked down her nose at him, and Erik giggled, embarrassed. JC got down on one knee beside Happy but made no move to help or hinder him.
“Happy, don’t do this. I need you sharp and focused.”
“What if I don’t want to be sharp and focused?” said Happy, looking only at the pills in front of him. “What if I don’t want to see something that’s more real than we are?”
“It’s the job,” said JC. “Look at you; you’re a mess from what you’ve taken so far.”
“It’s only the come-down,” muttered Happy. “I’ll be fine. But I need a little taste. Something to put me right.”
“No you don’t,” said JC.
“You don’t know what I need! We can’t all be big and brave and heroic, like you! Some of us are ordinary mortals, doing the best we can!” He looked at the pills he’d collected in his hand. “If you were me, you’d be knocking back the meds, too. So you wouldn’t have to be like me.”
“Happy . . .”
“I can’t do the job without them, JC. I just can’t.”
“Want to try some of mine?” said Natasha. Happy looked up, to find her standing over him offering a slim bottle of pills. Happy rose slowly to his feet, staring at the bottle as though hypnotised. JC stood up beside Happy but made no move to interfere.
“Only the very best, for the Crowley Project’s most favoured agents,” said Natasha. “Something to make you feel like a man, or a god, or whatever else it takes to get the job done. Want a little taste?”
“Tell you what,” said Happy, licking his dry lips.
“You try one of mine . . . and I’ll try one of yours. No? Didn’t think so. Did you really think I’d take sweeties from a stranger? Typical Project agent. Even now, you can’t resist manoeuvring for advantage. We’re facing the end of the world, and we still can’t trust each other.”
“Trust is fine,” said Natasha, making the slim bottle disappear about her person. “But always count your change. This . . . is only a marriage of convenience. And you can’t blame a girl for trying.”
“You were never a girl,” said Erik. “You were born fully mature, and nasty with it. Probably shot out of the womb demanding a gin and tonic and a ciggie, and a gun that fired real bullets.”
Natasha smiled on him. “How well you know me.”
Erik sniffed loudly, and moved away to peer closely at Kim. He walked round and round her, studying her from all angles, careful always to maintain a safe distance. Kim let him do it, studying him coolly. Erik finally stopped in front of her, looking thoughtfully into her ghostly face, so close their noses were almost touching.
“Boo!”
Kim laughed delightedly as Erik fell back several steps. He pulled his dignity back about him, doing his utmost to look like a scientist again.
“Remarkable phenomenon,” he said, in his best lecturer’s voice. “Very lifelike. Astonishing level of interaction with the living. Almost human.”
“More human than you,” Kim said sweetly. “Nasty little man.”
Erik flushed darkly. “Why did you destroy my computer?”
“Because it offended me,” said Kim. “Better be careful, Erik; you offend me, too.”
Erik actually looked a little hurt. “You don’t even know me . . .”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Kim. She drifted forward, and Erik backed away before her. Kim fixed him with a hard, critical gaze. “The dead see many things that are hidden from the living. I know why you had to leave Vienna University in such a hurry. I know why Interpol chased you across half of France. Shall I mention the dog with two heads, the monkey that aged backwards, the pig with the added human brains that could say seventeen words in Portuguese? And you really shouldn’t have surgically reworked that homeless girl’s circulatory system, to make it more efficient. Such a mess . . .”
“Shut up!” said Erik. “Shut up! Get out of my head!”
“Wouldn’t go in there on a bet,” said Kim. “It’s not my fault you wear your sins so openly.”
“They weren’t all failures! I achieved things, important things! I did!” Erik was breathing hard, almost on the edge of tears. “Don’t think I can’t hurt you because you’re dead!”
His left hand dived inside his coat, but JC was immediately there, putting himself between Kim and Erik.
“Don’t even think about it,” said JC.
Erik swallowed hard and looked away, unable to meet JC’s gaze, even muffled behind sunglasses. He nodded quickly to JC, and to Kim, then hurried away to hide behind Natasha, who ignored him.
“If you’ve all finished butting your heads together, perhaps we could concentrate on the extremely imminent end of the bloody world!” said Melody. “We are running out of time, people. Quite possibly literally.”
He moved over to join Melody at her instruments and made a show of studying the displays thoughtfully, as though they meant something to him. If Melody wasn’t entirely fooled, she was kind enough to keep it to herself.
“Any clues as to who or what our Intruder might be?” said JC, after a while.
“Nothing definitive,” said Melody. “But it’s not just . . . something from the afterworlds. This is Big, really quite unbelievably Big. One of the Great Beasts, perhaps. The Hogge, or the Serpent . . . Bad news on every level you can think of. If I really understood what these displays are telling me, I think I’d be very upset.”
“One of the Great Beasts?” said Happy, incredulously. “That is way out of our league!”
“Speak for yourself,” Natasha said immediately.
“You’re not fooling anyone,” Happy said viciously. “I can feel your fear from here.”
“You feel me again without my permission, and I’ll slap your face off,” said Natasha.
“Children, children . . .” JC murmured. “Play nice, or there will be spankings. Melody, could the presence of the Intruder in our world explain why I was touched by the Light? Was I granted this new strength to . . . even things out? Give us a fighting chance?”
“Who knows why the gods do anything?” said Erik.
“They are not gods!” Happy said immediately. “Don’t use that word. Never use that word. Just because they’re so much more than us, it doesn’t mean they’re gods.”
“What difference does it make?” said Kim, puzzled.
“Because you can’t fight gods,” said Happy.
“We can fight things that think they’re gods,” JC said cheerfully. “Remember that being we encountered in the supermarket car park? Worshipped by generations of early Humanity; and we still kicked its arse and sent it home crying. Melody, could our Intruder be anything like that?”
“No. That was a much more basic, even elemental, force. Not coherent enough even to have a name or identity. We’re faced with something far more sophisticated. A single entity, or presence, that can change our world simply by existing in it.” She looked at Happy. “Spell the word god with a lower case, and it’s a good enough term for what’s down here in the darkness with us.”
Everyone looked at each other. No-one wanted to be the first to say anything.
“We are not equipped to deal with a Great Beast,” Happy said finally. “Let’s be real here, people. Outer Forces like that are so far out of our league we couldn’t even see the league from where we are. We’re ghost finders, not god killers.”
“What we need are better weapons,” said Natasha.
“Bigger weapons. First rule of the Crowley Project: there’s nothing in supernature that can’t be taken down with a big enough stick. Maybe if we combined our resources . . .”
“You’re seriously contemplating throwing down with a god?” said Melody.
“We’ve been known to kill gods, at the Project,” said Erik airily. “Sometimes we eat them, too.”
“You couldn’t even stand up to me,” said Kim. “And I’m only dead.”
“Confidence is fun,” said JC. “Sanity is better. We need a plan.”
“We need weapons!” said Natasha.
“You can’t fight the Great Beasts!” said Happy. “They’re as much conceptual as anything, a horrible Idea from a higher plane, downloaded into physical form in our dimension. You can’t kill an Idea. The best we can hope for is to pry it loose from our plane and send it home with a flea in its ear.” He frowned, considering. “And we might be able to do that. So far, all the signs suggest our Intruder is following the standard pattern of any haunting, building everything from and around a single focal point.”
“You’re talking about me,” said Kim.
“We don’t know that for sure,” said JC.
Happy ignored him, looking at Melody. “How far away from us is the Intruder, and please say lots.”
“Hard to tell,” said Melody. “If I’m interpreting these readings correctly, and I’d be the first to admit that there’s a whole lot of guesswork involved . . . it seems our Intruder has added a whole new platform to this station. A half-way place, where its world butts up against ours. This new platform comes and goes, not always there, or at least, not always connected to our reality. It’s the Beast’s lair. Home for its new physical form. For whatever shape it’s taken in our world. We can only access this new station with the Intruder’s permission.”
“Is it there now?” said JC.
“Oh yes,” said Melody. “It’s driving my long-range sensors crazy. They don’t like the taste of it at all.”
Kim looked round suddenly. “JC, something’s coming.”
Everyone turned to look at her. JC moved over to stand beside her, but her gaze was elsewhere.
“Are you sure?” said Melody. “There’s nothing on the monitors.”
“Something’s coming,” said Kim, in a dreamy voice. “Something bad.”
JC studied Kim, who was floating in mid air with her head cocked slightly on one side, as though listening to something only she could hear.
“What is it, Kim? What’s coming for us? Where is it coming from?”
Her left hand rose slowly to point at the far tunnel-mouth. Everyone looked into the darkness, but there was no roar of an approaching train, no pressure wave of disturbed air. Even the rail tracks were free of any vibration. Natasha and Erik stood close together. JC and Happy stared silently at the tunnel-mouth, considering their options. And Melody stood protectively between her machines and whatever was coming, her machine-pistol at the ready. Happy surreptitiously dry swallowed a couple of pills. He took a deep breath, and sweat popped out across his face. His heart was beating dangerously fast.
A Tube train emerged from the tunnel-mouth, moving smoothly and silently, an ordinary train, with ordinary empty cars. Except the engine made no sound at all, and the brightly lit cars didn’t rock or clatter in the slightest. The train pulled slowly, steadily, into the station, with barely a breath of disturbed air, and came easily to a halt. The five agents braced themselves, ready for any kind of attack; but nothing happened. After a while, one set of car doors slid silently open and waited, invitingly. No-one moved. None of them liked the look of this train. There was nothing obviously unnatural about it, apart from its quiet, but if anything, it was too ordinary, too perfect, as though it was newly made, never used before.
“All right,” said JC. “This is an invitation. The Intruder sent this train to bring us to it. No more games, no more attacks . . . But why? Because we’ve proved we can handle anything it can throw at us? Because we’ve proved ourselves worthy? Or because it’s so much stronger on its home ground . . . Could it be that it’s afraid there’s something we could do, to drive it from our plane, if it doesn’t deal with us first? Is it because the Light reached down and touched me, or because we have Kim now?”
“Questions, questions,” said Natasha. “At the Project, we prefer direct action.”
“Shoot first and ask questions later,” said Erik. “Preferably through a medium.”
“We can’t answer questions without new data,” said Melody. “And we have to do something, while we still can. This thing’s power levels are already off the scale. I think it’s getting ready to spread its influence beyond this station.”
“You mean through the rest of the Underground?” said JC.
“I mean through the rest of the city,” said Melody. “And then across the worlds. Rewriting the rules of our reality to make a new world, more like its home dimension. I don’t think there’d be much room for Humanity in a world like that.”
“We have to warn people,” said Happy. “Contact the Boss, call for help . . . Get some of the A teams down here, with serious firepower. This has got way too big for us.”
“You heard the Boss,” said JC. “None of the A teams can get here in time. There is no-one else. Just us.” He looked
at Natasha and Erik. “I hate to ask, but I think at this point I’d even welcome help from the Project. Is there any chance . . .”
“No,” Natasha said reluctantly. “By the time we convinced the Project, it would be too late. Our current Head, Vivienne MacAbre, isn’t as trusting as we are.”
“I’ve heard of her,” said Happy, unexpectedly. “Does she really eat white mice for breakfast?”
“So they say,” said Erik. “Baby mice, stuffed with hummingbirds’ tongues. On little toast soldiers. Of course, that’s only when she isn’t feasting on the hearts of our enemies. Vivienne’s always been a traditionalist at heart.”
JC looked at Melody. “What do your machines make of this train? Is it real or something created by the Intruder?”
“I can’t tell,” Melody said helplessly. “With the power levels the Intruder’s generating, the question’s pretty much meaningless. It can make things real just by thinking about them.”
Happy strode up to the car and kicked the open doors. “Feels real.”
“Oh hell,” said JC. “You’ve taken some of mother’s little helpers, haven’t you?”
“Oh yes!” said Happy. “And I feel great!”
“Wonderful,” said JC. He considered the train for a long moment. “It’s real enough. It’ll get us there. Because the Intruder wants to meet us in person. Well, I want to meet the Intruder. So let’s go.”
He stepped into the car through the waiting doors and looked quickly around to assure himself it really was as empty as it appeared. Kim floated in after him, comforting him with her presence as best she could. She knew he was remembering another train, and another car, and what had happened to him there. JC took off his sunglasses and looked up and down the length of the car; but even his new eyes couldn’t detect any booby-traps or hidden evils. He glanced briefly at Kim.
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