Ghost of a Chance g-1 Read online

  He broke off as the sound of the train grew suddenly louder—painfully, deafeningly loud. It filled their heads and shuddered in their bones, a far louder sound than any train should ever make. Like the roar of a great beast, it filled the station, harsh and threatening. JC realised he could feel it as much as hear it, a terrible presence that triggered a recognition in the darkest and most primitive levels of his mind, where the lizard brain had never forgotten how it felt to be hunted, to be prey. The whole platform shook, as though it was afraid of what was coming.

  JC stuck his head right next to Melody’s and shouted in her ear. “Is this real? Is that a real train coming, or some kind of psychic projection?”

  “Are you crazy?” she yelled back. “Listen to it! Doesn’t it sound real?”

  “It’s too loud! It’s too loud, and I don’t trust it! What do your instruments say? Is it real?”

  Melody checked her instruments, clinging to them for support. “It’s real enough! It’s showing up on all the sensors as a real moving physical object!”

  “Of course it’s real!” yelled Happy, glaring at the tunnel-mouth. “I can hear screaming! I can feel real pain and horror and death! It’s real! It’s real! God help us all, it’s real!”

  A burst of compressed air slammed out of the tunnel-mouth ahead of the on-coming train, sweeping through the station, hitting the three ghost finders like a blow in the face. They all rocked back on their feet as the air wave hit them, then the train roared into the station at impossible speed, brakes squealing painfully as the cars shuddered and skidded to a halt. Clouds of steam billowed up around the train and its long row of cars, thick creamy steam that stank of brimstone and blood, spoiled meat and sour milk. JC turned his head away from it. Melody bent over her instruments as though she could protect them with her body. Happy gazed into the slowly dispersing cloud of steam with an awful fascination, his face twisted with horror and disgust. JC made himself look back at the train. The steam died away, revealing a line of cars that stretched the whole length of the platform.

  Every car was packed full of people, men and women from earlier in the day, caught and trapped, then taken away, not to be seen again, until that moment. They’d been in there for hours, travelling God alone knew where, in the dark places under the earth. Driven mad, they had turned on each other. JC and Happy and Melody watched helplessly as the trapped passengers went at each other with their bare hands. Half-naked, clothes torn and tattered, they fought and tore at each other like animals, their faces distorted by savage, primal emotions. They murdered and raped and ate each other, laughing and crying and howling like the damned things they were. Blood and shit and piss, and other liquids from torn-out organs, had been spattered and smeared across the car-windows, but not enough to hide the horror within. The uproar from inside the cars was almost unbearable, a horrible mixture of sounds that should never have come from human mouths.

  JC and Happy and Melody saw it all, like glimpses into Hell.

  JC grabbed Melody by the shoulders and physically turned her away from the sight, making her concentrate on her instrument panels instead. It helped to steady her, a little. She stopped shuddering and shaking and fought to understand what the readings were telling her. Happy was lying on the platform, curled up into a ball, both hands over his ears, while tears coursed down his face from behind clenched-shut eyes. JC shook Happy’s shoulder hard, and even kicked him a few times, but Happy was beyond reaching. JC reluctantly left him to his misery. There was nothing he could do to help Happy, but he had to believe there was still something he could do for the people trapped in the cars.

  He strode over to the nearest doors and tried to force them open; but they wouldn’t budge, no matter how much strength he threw against them. He strained until his fingers cried out with the pain, and his back muscles ached fiercely. None of it did any good. He ran down the whole length of the train, trying door after door, and couldn’t move any of them. The train wasn’t going to give up its prey that easily. JC lurched back up the platform, breathing hard, his face slightly crazed, beating at the car-windows with his fists and shouting hoarsely, trying to reach the people within. To get them to acknowledge his presence, to stop them mutilating each other, if only for a moment. But none of them so much as noticed him, intent on the awful things they were doing and their own torment. JC wasn’t even sure they knew the train had stopped.

  He tried the front doors, nearest the engine, struggling to force his aching fingers into the gap between the doors.

  “You really think that’s a good idea?” said Melody, raising her voice over the bedlam. “You really want to let those animals loose, out here with us? Listen to them!”

  “They’re the victims here!” JC said savagely. “It’s not their fault! They’ve been driven to this. Maybe if we can get them out . . . they’ll be themselves again. We have to try! We have to try to save some of them . . .”

  But he couldn’t open the doors. He fell back from the train, breathing harshly, desperate to do . . . something. He spotted Happy still curled up on the platform and lurched over to him. He bent over the telepath, pulled the man’s hands away from his ears, and shook him viciously until Happy’s eyes opened and focused on JC.

  “Leave me alone,” Happy said pitifully. “I can’t stand it. I can’t.”

  “What are you picking up from the train?” demanded JC.

  “Are you mad?” said Happy. “I’m doing all I can to shut it out! But it’s too strong, too powerful . . . my shields are nothing to it! Fear and horror and suffering, that’s what I’m getting! I’m not picking up a single coherent human thought from anyone on the whole bloody train!”

  “Can you make them hear you?” said JC.

  “They’re beyond that,” Happy said miserably. “They’re trapped in the eternal moment. Damned to a single time and place, forever. Only aware of themselves and each other; and the awful things they’re doing. They don’t even know we’re here.”

  JC turned to Melody. “Talk to me! What are your instruments showing? Anything we can use?”

  “Massive energy readings,” said Melody, concentrating on her instrument panels so she wouldn’t have to look at the train. Her eyes were wild, and she looked like she might be sick at any moment, but she kept her voice steady. “Definite traces of other-dimensional energies, but not from the train, or the poor bastards inside it. There’s something here in the station with us, deep in the system. In the tunnels, or maybe even underneath them. It’s powering the train, making it possible. It’s responsible for everything that’s happening.”

  JC looked back at the long line of cars, packed with blood and horror and endless carnage. Bodies slamming together, teeth and fingers sinking into flesh; men and women driven out of their minds by base and brutal urges and appetites. They clung to life with a terrible tenacity; in the face of murder and rape and cannibalism, they would not lie down and die. Broken and bloodied, with gaping holes in them where flesh and organs had been torn away and eaten, still they fought on. A woman’s screaming face was slammed against the car-window right in front of JC. Slammed again and again and again, till her features disappeared into a pulped and bloody mess. And still she screamed, and struggled . . .

  He turned back to Melody, his voice shaking with shock and frustrated rage. “Do something! There must be something you can do! What good are your precious instruments if they can’t do anything! Stop this! At least . . . open a door so I can get to them!”

  “I can’t!” Melody yelled back at him. “It’s too big, too powerful! Just by being here, this train is overwhelming all my sensors. Something like this shouldn’t even exist in our dimension. The material plane isn’t strong enough to contain it. I think . . . the train itself is alive, and aware, and gorging itself on the suffering.”

  And then the engine revved up, the sound painfully loud, and the cars jerked forward as the hell train pulled out of the station, gathering speed impossibly quickly. Then it disappeared into the far t
unnel-mouth and was gone, taking its cargo of the damned with it. That dreadful, downbound train.

  Suddenly, the station was still and silent and sane again. Melody slumped over her instruments, sweat running down her face. Happy leaned against the wall, pressing his face against the cool tiles, his eyes wide open because he couldn’t stand to see what he saw when he closed them. JC stood helplessly in the middle of the platform, trying to find something to say, and failing.

  Happy tried to pull a bottle of pills out of his pocket, but his hands were shaking too much. He finally jerked the bottle out, only to watch it fall from his hands as he tried and failed to open the child-proofed lid. The plastic bottle hit the platform hard but bounced without breaking and rolled back and forth at his feet. Happy started to cry.

  JC moved over and stood close beside him. He knew better than to touch the telepath but did his best to comfort Happy with his presence. JC had finally got his breathing under control, but he still looked like he’d been in a fight, and lost.

  “We’re all shaking,” JC said finally. “How about that. We’ve faced worse than this, in our time. I have to say, I thought we were stronger than this.”

  “Normally, we are,” said Melody. “But this was different. We deal with hauntings, echoes, memories of the past. We’re not used to dealing with real blood and violence and death, right there in front of us. Most of the things we experience . . . actually happened long ago. Done and finished, years before. There was nothing we could do about them, nothing we could do to save the people involved. We came in afterwards, to clean up the mess they’d left behind.”

  “This is different,” said JC slowly. “We have to stop this happening, before it gets any worse. Before it has a chance to spread . . .”

  “Don’t,” said Happy. “Just . . . don’t, okay?”

  “Buck up, man,” said JC, in something very like his normal voice. He made himself stand up straight and moved over to stand beside Melody, so he could pretend to study the monitor displays. “We need more information. Hard information that we can rely on. Particularly, we need to locate the source for all this. Can you give me anything, Melody?”

  She shook her head. “Whatever it is, it’s unnaturally powerful and really well hidden. Defended by energies of a kind I’ve never encountered before. We’re way beyond this world’s science, JC. We’re in other-dimensional territory now. It’s confusing the hell out of my computers; they can’t tell me what it is, only what it isn’t. But if you’re ready for some more bad news . . . From the way its defensive shields reacted to my sensor probes, I’m pretty sure it knows we’re here and looking for it.”

  “Wonderful,” Happy said bitterly. “Can things get any worse?”

  “Hold it,” said Melody. “I’ve got energy spikes all across my boards! Something’s coming!”

  “Not another train,” said Happy. “Please say it’s not another train. I couldn’t stand it.”

  “No,” said Melody. “Nothing like the hell train. Nothing so brutal. This is more . . . subtle.”

  All three of them looked around, but there was nothing to see. The dark tunnel-mouth was empty, and the rail tracks were still. There was a subtle tension in the air, a feeling of imminence, of something about to happen. The light seemed even fiercer, the shadows deeper. And then webbing began to form, appearing out of nowhere all down the length of the platform. Thick grey spider-webs, forming like mist out of the brittle air. They crawled across the high ceiling, spreading in patterns like frost, shooting this way and that in sudden spurts. More of the stuff dropped from the ceiling, floating down in sheets of silver-grey gauze. Thick clumps of webbing formed in the angles and intersections between platform and wall, and shot up over the metal seats and the vending machines, cocooning them in moments. Long strands drifted on the air, undulating slowly on unfelt gusts of wind.

  The webbing smelled of dust, and dead things, and the fading past. Both tunnel-mouths were blocked off with a single huge web, far beyond the ability of any earthly spider. Thick strands of webbing, like dull grey cables, drawn in intricate, jagged patterns. Both of the huge webs billowed slowly here and there, as though pressed from the other side by something large trying to get through. Long streamers drifted towards JC and his people, light as gossamer but full of purpose.

  Heavy clumps of webbing fell in sudden jerks from the ceiling, hanging down like grey stalactites. JC’s breath caught in his throat as he realised there were shapes inside the webbing. Human bodies, wrapped and cocooned, with blank, staring faces barely visible through the dull grey shrouds. The bodies didn’t move. They were dead. They had to be dead. JC made himself study what he could make out of the faces; but he didn’t recognise anyone from the missing persons files he’d studied earlier. He wasn’t sure what he could have done if he had recognised anyone. And then a thought struck him . . .

  “Happy,” JC said carefully, “I don’t think I trust this. Any of this. It’s . . . too sudden to be anything natural. Is any of this real?”

  “Not even close,” said Happy. He was standing up straight now and was actually smiling. Now he had something he could recognise and deal with. “It’s all a projected image.”

  Melody scowled as she tried to scrape thick masses of webbing off her precious instruments. It clung tenaciously to her hand as she tried to shake it off, and she had to rub her hand hard against her hip to shift it. “Bloody well feels real enough . . .”

  “Of course it feels real, that’s the point,” said Happy. “But it’s all nothing but a telepathically broadcast image designed to prey on standard fears and discomforts.” He snapped his fingers dismissively, and every bit of webbing disappeared from the station. Happy smiled, smugly. “Kid’s stuff. They must think they’re dealing with amateurs.”

  “‘They’?” said Melody, still surreptitiously rubbing her hand against her hip. “What they? Are you saying those images didn’t come from whatever was running the hell train?”

  “Exactly,” said Happy. “Something that powerful doesn’t need to deal in images. No; we underwent a psychic attack, one of the first things my Institute trainers taught me to defend myself against. It’s the Project telepath. She knows where we are.”

  “Okay,” said JC. “This we can deal with.”

  “And the other-dimensional nasty?” said Melody.

  “We’ll get to it,” said JC. “After we’ve kicked the Project agents out of here.”

  “I love it when he gets all confident,” Happy said to Melody. “Don’t you just love it when he gets all confident? Doesn’t it make you feel all safe and protected?”

  “The hell train was sent to break our nerve, undermine our confidence,” JC said patiently. “But in the end, it doesn’t matter what’s behind this haunting. If it’s come into our world, it has to obey our rules. It can’t operate here unless it’s taken on a material form; and if it’s material, we can kick its arse.”

  “I knew it,” said Happy, rolling his eyes. “He’s going to walk up to an other-dimensional entity and look for an arse to kick. I want a transfer to another team. Do you know if the Foreign Legion’s hiring?”

  “You don’t speak French,” said Melody.

  “I’ll learn!”

  “Hush, man,” said JC imperiously. “Your leader and commander is talking. Even if we are dealing with some Force or Power from the afterworlds, whatever it is must be using someone or something from our dimension as a focus, an entry point into our plane of existence. Some original event that roots the haunting in this station. So all we have to do is identify and locate the focal point, deal with it, and we can shut this whole mess down. Melody?”

  “I’m working on it,” said Melody. She felt rather better, now that she had a definite goal to pursue. “I’m getting so many readings, it’s hard to tell what’s significant and what isn’t . . . I’ve never seen so many manifestations in one location. This place must be lousy with ghosts at the best of times.”

  JC looked at Happy. “Well?”<
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  “Don’t push me!” he snapped. “I’m trying! But the aether’s so full of psychic information it’s practically saturated. There’s too much going on; it’s like a thousand signals all broadcasting at once and bouncing around inside my head.”

  “Try,” said JC.

  “Bully! I need my pills.”

  “Then take some,” said JC. “Do whatever you have to, to put your thoughts in order. Because you’re no use to me like this.”

  “JC!” said Melody, turning away from her keyboards to glare at him. “You know what too much of that stuff does to him! Those pills are killing him by inches!”

  “Yes,” said JC. “I know. But we all do what we have to. Needs must when the Devil drives, and all that. A few for now, Happy. Just enough to let you function.”

  “You ruthless little shit,” said Melody. And she turned her back on both of them and concentrated on her machines.

  “You’re a good man, JC,” said Happy, fumbling a handful of bottles from out of his pockets and peering myopically at the handwritten labels. “I don’t care what anyone else says.”

  He finally selected one particular bottle, smiled cheerily in anticipation, got the cap off with only a little effort, and knocked back two little green pills. He dry swallowed hard, considered, then took one more before replacing the cap and making the bottle disappear. He stood very still, contemplating what was going on inside him, then his lips widened into a smile like a death’shead grin.

  “Oh yes . . . This is the stuff to give the boys! It’s bad down here, but I’m the baddest thing in this station! Yes yes yes!” He broke into a soft-shoe routine, lost interest, realised JC was looking at him steadily, and giggled briefly. “On the job, JC! Oh yes! I’m getting something. I’m picking up all kinds of psychic traces, but only one original to this location that’s recent enough to qualify as a probable focal point. God, I feel lucid. Something happened right here, on this platform, within the last few days.”

  “Are you . . . all right, Happy?” said Melody. “You don’t look too good.”