Haunters (9780545502542)

by Taylor, Thomas

  Doctors. My aunt will make me see doctors.

  Eddie drew hard lines through aunt that were almost as black as the mark he’d made scribbling out Father.

  Mother will be safe in the country, but I cannot go.

  Then he drew a ring around this and took a line back up to an earlier question:

  What should I do about David?

  He chewed on his pencil a moment, and then drew fierce lines through most of what he’d written. He circled David and then connected it with a new word.

  Kat.

  Thinking of Kat made Eddie smile, despite the burns on his face. Kat was the one who had warned him to be careful of David. Eddie hadn’t listened to her — he’d been too busy probing the mystery of his ghostly visitor — but Kat had cared enough to say something, and now she’d been proved right, hadn’t she? Being right was what mattered most to Eddie, and no voice in his head could ever contradict that. He watched his pencil make lazy, affectionate circles around Kat’s name. She was a good friend. His mother always said he should be cautious about having friends, that they wouldn’t understand him, but Kat didn’t seem to have any trouble. He’d kept their friendship secret, though, just in case.

  Eddie wrote his own name next to Kat’s and connected them with a single neat line. Then he completed the triangle by connecting his name to David’s too. At what he judged to be the exact center of this triangle, Eddie drew a fat question mark and started a new line from it that went over to the next page. But what he would write there he had no idea. Not until he’d talked to Kat some more.

  And now Eddie realized he’d answered his very first question. What he should do now was go to Kat’s place. She would help him work out the rest.

  He closed his book, rolled it carefully, and slipped it back into his pocket. He picked up his satchel. Inside he felt the reassuring bulk of a dozen new notebooks, enough to tackle the problems of his world well into the future. Next to them, he knew, were a bunch of pencils in a rubber band, a sharpening knife, a flashlight, glue, stamps and string, and a dozen other things he’d need. He pulled the satchel over his shoulder tight and safe.

  Eddie slipped out into the smoke and dark to find Kat.

  Professor Feldrake’s office was off the gallery and just above the wall of dark glass David had noticed earlier. It gave a clear view down into the Map Room below and had the word DIRECTOR on a sign at the door.

  Except for the green of a very elderly computer screen on the professor’s desk, the office was lit only by the shifting light of the hologram outside. The room was a chaotic jumble of files, books, and even flaking scrolls. The walls were almost entirely covered by shelves, which sagged with leather spines, framed photos, and myriad antique objects from all ages of human history. There were so many teetering stacks of printouts on the floor that there was barely space to walk.

  “The professor still believes in paper,” Petra whispered to David.

  It looked for a moment as if the old man was going to ask the girl to leave, but he eventually waved for them both to enter. At the far end of the room a pair of ornate wooden doors — entirely out of place in the modern architecture — stood closed. The professor took an enormous ring of elaborate metal keys from his desk and began sorting through them.

  “There’s something I still don’t get about all this,” said David, looking around at this Aladdin’s cave of an office and watching the shifting light of the hologram pick out the strange shapes within. “If what you’ve told me is true — this whole time-jumping, dreamwalker thing — why don’t people know about it? I mean, it’s amazing! Why keep it secret?”

  “Well, think about it for a moment,” said the professor, holding each key up to the golden light to inspect it. “We’re talking time-travel here, but not in the way most people expect. It’s not as if we can sell tickets, is it? Just a few very gifted people can go, and only teenagers at that. We’re running the most extraordinary intelligence agency the world has ever known, but no one’s exactly given us permission to do that. Nations guard their history as fiercely as they guard their borders. They wouldn’t take kindly to a bunch of kids running through their precious past, believe me.”

  “But why not? What are they scared of?”

  “The truth!” said Petra, doing a surprisingly good impression of the professor.

  “Yes,” said Professor Feldrake, waggling a long iron key at Petra like an admonishing finger, “the truth. No laughing matter, young lady.”

  Then he turned to David, clearly sensing the chance to give another lecture.

  “So much of what people think they know about history is mere conjecture, David — guesswork based on scraps of evidence, more myth than reality. Do you think people are ready to hear the full truth about Jesus, for example? Or Mohammed or the Buddha? I mean everything about them? Or what about the great events that shaped national identities — the American War of Independence or the French Revolution or the Space Race? The truth behind these things is usually rather less comforting than the stories we tell ourselves about them. No, it’s better for all if the Dreamwalker Project stays firmly under wraps.”

  “So what’s the point of it, then?” David picked up a fossil ammonite from the professor’s desk and turned it around in his hands. “Why send dreamwalkers into the past at all if you won’t tell anyone what they see?”

  “I didn’t say we don’t use the information we gather,” Professor Feldrake replied, rattling the key into a buckled iron box lock on the great doors. “We just have to be careful how we release it, that’s all. But this isn’t the reason I brought you here, David.”

  And he turned the key with the centuries-old sound of tumbling cogs.

  The doors fell open, carrying into the office a cold breeze, laced with a powerful smell that David knew somehow but couldn’t identify. Darkness waited beyond, a darkness that even the light of the hologram couldn’t reach. David took an instinctive step back.

  “Professor, who is Adam working for now? What is the Haunting?”

  “Ah, what indeed?” said Professor Feldrake with a mischievous glance over his shoulder. Then, without warning, he stepped into the darkness beyond the doorway and vanished from view. For a time his footsteps floated back with a surprising echo, then there was silence.

  David turned to look at Petra.

  “I think he’s expecting you to follow,” she said.

  David worked hard not to gulp. Only a short while ago he’d told Roman that he didn’t believe in ghosts, yet staring into the dark ahead it took a great effort of will to force his legs forward. But he was very aware that Petra was watching him, and he tried to rationalize his fear away as he edged across the doorway. The dark closed around him.

  “Professor?” His voice trembled.

  No reply.

  He went farther still.

  Light burst out right in front of him. A spectral figure leaped from the dark, its arms raised, its twisted face an unholy shade of livid blue.

  A ghost!

  David cried out in terror and stumbled back, tripping over his own feet.

  The specter loomed over him.

  Then he heard a loud click.

  Banks of neon light erupted into life all around. They revealed a vaulted rock chamber even vaster than the one that contained the Metascape Map. It shocked David with its sudden size. And the ghost was still there! But as David lay where he’d fallen, he saw that the ghostly figure was flat now and surrounded by a very unscary crumbling gilt frame. It was nothing more than a life-sized painting, standing in what appeared to be some kind of enormous museum gallery.

  “That wasn’t funny!” David’s heart was still pounding as he shouted. Petra came over and helped him up, not quite managing to hide her grin. The professor, who was standing by a bank of switches, raised his hands in apology.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said. “But I do that with all our new people. The power of fear can never be overstated. You’ve just learned an important lesson,
David, and been given the answer to your question. Fear is a powerful motivator. The Haunting uses it to gain power over their victims. When those victims live in the past, this gives the Haunting power over history too. Control history, and you control the world.”

  As the last of the strips flickered on, David could finally take in the full scope of what he was seeing. He soon forgot his anger. Behind the ghost painting was a cave of treasures.

  Row after row of shelves, tables, and display stands reached up over three floors, right to the ceiling. Almost every available surface and cabinet was crammed with objects, paintings, statues, books — innumerable artifacts from every strand of world history. Chinese dragons were pushed up against Egyptian sarcophagi, beside stacks of books and medieval carvings. A giant stone statue of a woman with snakes in her hair and wild, terrifying eyes towered in the center of the room, and David remembered the ancient Greek story of the Gorgon. The cabinets nearer to him were heaped with glittering objects and antique machines of bewildering and outlandish types. All around stood wooden crates like the ones he’d seen earlier, some half empty, some closed and stacked high.

  And now David recognized the smell. It was the whiff of age and ancient things, the accumulated odor of history.

  “Ghosts have been seen in every age of man,” said Professor Feldrake, walking over to stand with David before the painting. “El Greco, the man who painted this, certainly saw one. And more recently, since the invention of the camera, there have been photographs.” And he pointed across to a nearby display.

  David moved closer — it was full of photos of wispy forms, man-shaped lights in the dark, silhouettes in burning windows. Some of them were even familiar to David as famous images of ghosts.

  “Time to start believing in them,” said the professor. “The Haunting is aptly named.”

  “The Haunting is behind all this? They’re the ghosts people see?”

  “Dreamwalkers are ghosts,” the professor corrected. “Ours are seen too, and people have been accidentally dreamwalking for thousands of years, entirely unaware of the effect they’ve been having. But the Haunting is different. Their dreamwalkers — ‘haunters,’ we call them — deliberately set out to scare.”

  David turned away from the disturbing pictures, too creeped out to say anything. He looked back up at the giant statue of the Gorgon. Its hair was a writhing mass of serpents, and its face set with a petrifying expression. It was no less scary than the photos, but as David turned to look elsewhere, his eyes snapped back to it.

  “That’s … that’s you!” he said, turning to Petra.

  Petra’s eyes flashed back at him, her tangled hair suddenly reminiscent of snakes. Then the defiance vanished from her expression and she looked down with shame. Shame, and something even worse.

  “Everyone makes mistakes,” she mumbled.

  “It’s not just ghosts,” said Professor Feldrake, quickly taking David’s elbow and leading him away. “Haunters pass themselves off as other supernatural beings too: angels, nature spirits, monsters out of legend — anything they can be sure will terrify or impress. They understand the value of myth only too well.”

  “But why do they do it?”

  “Money, power, the sheer thrill of it …” The professor ticked them off on his fingers, a look of disgust on his face. “Imagine someone had missed out on a huge inheritance because their ancestor had been the second-born son. How much would they pay to send a ghost back in time to try and cause the will to be changed? Or even terrorize the first-born into an early grave? To persuade him to buy a ticket for the Titanic, say, or haunt him into signing up for the trenches in the First World War — things that were never part of his original history. People will do almost anything to rid themselves of a ghost. The Haunting has grown rich and powerful by terrorizing the past, David, and we have never been busier trying to stop them. Cleaning up the mess they make has filled this chamber — everything you see here was created directly out of the Haunting’s interference with history. We’ll even raid normal museums ourselves, if it means putting the historical record straight.”

  They came to a halt beside the glass of a softly lit display case. Inside, beside a small painted portrait of a woman, a crumbling book was open at a finely detailed chalk drawing. It depicted a panel or tray of switches beneath a box. The inside of the box contained a complex diagram heavily adorned with notes. Judging by the yellowing of the paper the book was obviously very old, yet the drawing bore an uncanny resemblance to something David saw every day of his life.

  “No way!” He turned to look at the professor. “A computer?”

  “Yes, indeed. Drawn in the sixteenth century by Leonardo da Vinci. Obviously it wouldn’t have worked — he’d never have got the parts — but the idea is centuries ahead of its time. This drawing could have upturned years of human history if we hadn’t been able to get it hidden until the present time.”

  “The Haunting did this too? But … what’s this got to do with scaring people?”

  “Fear is just the beginning. Do you know the saying, ‘knowledge is power’? Well, in the past, knowledge of the future is not only powerful, it is beyond price. It can dazzle kings, buy the service of emperors, and certainly bewitch brilliant men like da Vinci. In exchange for the information shown in this drawing, da Vinci painted a small canvas and had it hidden away. It must have seemed a tiny price to pay the haunter who visited him, but a newly discovered painting by Leonardo da Vinci would be worth billions in today’s art market. Imagine it — another Mona Lisa!”

  Professor Feldrake tapped the glass above the small painting of a woman’s head that hung beside the book in the display case.

  “Fortunately, we got hold of that too. If only we were always this successful.”

  David stared at the painting for a moment, then walked on in a daze, his eyes roving over more objects. He read their labels as he passed: THE BAGHDAD BATTERY, an electrical apparatus from the ancient world; THE ANTIKETHERA DEVICE, a navigational computer from Ancient Greece; THE COVENTRY CANNON, a machine that appeared at first glance to be a musical instrument but which turned out to be nothing less than a steam-powered machine gun from medieval England. David shook his head in disbelief. It didn’t take much imagination to see that an unscrupulous time-traveler could use history as a gold mine.

  “Now do you see how vulnerable historical figures can be to a rogue dreamwalker?” the professor said, coming to stand beside David.

  “Fear gets their attention, then secrets of the future buy their devotion. It’s a potent combination, and one the Haunting are masters at using. Adam will be using it now, David — he’ll be using every trick in the Haunting’s book to find and eliminate Eddie.”

  Morning brought light to a wounded London. The docks, which had been hit hard in the night raid, were chaotic but busy. Those whose livelihoods depended on the river toiled alongside firemen and soldiers to clear the ruin. Pumps were worked at full capacity, bringing the waters of the Thames to bear on stubborn flames as a thick atmosphere of smoke and winter dampness crept between the warehouses. Blast-twisted cranes leaned in from above like dead trees in a mist.

  A man named Charlie Grinn looked out through the grubby window of Spurlington’s Shipping Agency and wondered why his men weren’t back yet. Grinn was a dangerous man to disappoint — just ask the late Mr. Spurlington — but he didn’t like being without his bodyguards, not when you couldn’t see more than a dozen paces down the foggy quayside.

  “Anything could step out of that,” he murmured to himself, angrily taking a swig of whiskey from one of Mr. Spurlington’s finest cut-crystal tumblers. “Bleedin’ coppers everywhere.”

  Grinn never stayed in any one place for long, but thanks to the Luftwaffe the docks were so dangerous at night that a wanted man with a gambler’s heart could forget the police for a while. Grinn would be spending the next few days at the Agency offices, and if the lads were doing their jobs properly, they’d be out and about, making sure the p
lace was secure.

  Secure — that was a joke. The building next door had been secure until a bomb had landed on it. Grinn smiled to himself, smoothing his thin mustache as he thought how terrified his men would be at having to stay there. But they’d never dare defy him, not Charlie Grinn — not the most ruthless manhunter in London, Blitz or no Blitz, never a question asked and the body disposed of for free. He took another swig and looked over at the dartboard they’d fixed up.

  “Time for a quick game,” said Grinn, but as he began turning from the window, he stopped and looked back. Had he just seen someone out there in the smoke and mist, someone watching the office? One of his men? Or had it just been a cat? He narrowed his eyes, but there was no one there now, just the faint impression of people working far down the quayside.

  “Bah. I’ll be seein’ things next.”

  Grinn walked away from the window — and froze. In the glass pane of the front door, behind the reversed letters of the name Spurlington, was the dark and unmistakable shape of a person, standing just outside. Grinn’s hand went straight to his pocket. His fingers quickly found the bone handle of his switchblade, rejected it, then pulled out his revolver.

  “What do you want?” he called.

  No reply.

  Grinn took a fortifying swig and put the whiskey glass down, cursing his men for being late. He strode to the door and yanked it open.

  “We’re closed,” he said to the person standing there, the gun almost concealed behind his back. “Sling yer ’ook!”