Ghost of a Chance Read online

  “I’ve heard things, too,” said Melody. “Some of them eat ghosts. Don’t look at me like that . . . It’s what I’ve heard. They eat ghosts: memories, identities, maybe even souls for all I know. I never wanted to look into it that closely. People in the Institute don’t eat souls. Do they?”

  “No,” said JC. “We still hang people for that. There are a lot of things Project agents do that we don’t. They have no morals, no scruples, no inhibitions, and less restraint. They know a lot of things we don’t because we won’t do what’s necessary to acquire such awful skills. The Crowley Project follow their own path, pursue their own ends, and all we ever need to know is which side they’re on, so we can safely take the other. They are the bad guys in any given situation. They don’t care about the dead or the living; they go after what they want, and to hell with whoever gets hurt or killed in the process.”

  “Well, yes, but there’s more to them than that,” said Happy.

  “No there isn’t,” JC said flatly. “You think there is because all those pills you take make you paranoid. Not to mention seriously weird.”

  “All right then, tell me this,” Happy said defiantly. “Why are new bad places appearing so frequently these days? Why are there always more, no matter how many we defuse or shut down? I hear things; and I don’t just mean telepathically.”

  “Go on,” said Melody. “Tell us, Happy. You always know the best gossip. And not because you’re a first-class telepath with no scruples and no life.”

  “I shall rise above that,” said Happy. “Look; this is me, rising.”

  “Get on with it,” said JC.

  “Hey; I’m not the only one who thinks this! There are a lot of people at the Institute, really high-up and seriously connected people, who worry about what the Crowley Project are really all about. Some of us have been wondering whether the Project might have . . . done something to weaken the barriers between this world and the afterworlds. Either deliberately or by accident. Did they try something that backfired or went badly wrong? Did they try to make some kind of alliance with one of the Outer Forces, try to bring something like that through into our world? And then lost control over it? Is that why everything’s going to hell in a hand-cart these days?”

  “Maybe you should be taking more pills, not less,” said JC.

  “Or,” said Happy, leaning forward, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper, “could it actually be even worse than that? Could it be that the highest levels of the Carnacki Institute have been doing things they shouldn’t? There are rumours . . . There are those who say that, possibly, there are people in the Institute on a much higher level than we have access to who approved an operation they shouldn’t have; and as a result, something really bad has happened, something that those very people are desperately trying to put right before anyone finds out . . . before the whole world falls apart. Could this whole situation, this unprecedented Code One Haunting right in the heart of London, be the result of a Major Working gone terribly wrong? And that’s why we’re here, rather than one of the A teams, because the Boss wants this handled quietly, by entirely expendable agents?”

  “Okay,” said JC. “You’re really starting to worry me now.”

  “Good,” said Happy. “Join the club. We’ve got our own badges and everything. Now take it a step further. What if there’s another group? Some third organisation that’s so secret even we don’t know about them, working in the shadows of the world for their own dark reasons?”

  “Stop that,” JC said firmly. “Stop that right now before my brains start to leak out my ears. That way paranoia lies.”

  “Welcome to my world,” said Happy.

  “You’ve given me a headache now,” said Melody, accusingly.

  “I’ve got a pill for that,” said Happy.

  Melody let out a sudden bark of laughter. “Like I’d ever touch anything you use. I take my consciousness straight, not altered, thank you very much.”

  Happy sniffed. “Don’t know what you’re missing.”

  And then all three of them looked round sharply, staring into the right-hand tunnel-mouth. From out of the impenetrable darkness came the sound of an approaching train. A low, muted roar, drawing steadily closer. Except that this part of the Tube network had been shut down, all regular trains diverted to other lines and other stations. The three ghost finders moved instinctively closer to each other, staring into the dark tunnel-mouth as the sound of the train grew steadily louder.

  “Is it coming here?” said JC. “To this platform?”

  Melody looked quickly across her sensor readings. “Coming right at us, JC. Damn, it’s moving fast.”

  Happy stepped reluctantly away from the others, as though drawn to the dark tunnel-mouth. He moved slowly forward, step by step, listening rather than looking. JC gestured for Melody to be quiet. Happy stopped at the very end of the platform, a few feet short of the gaping darkness.

  “It’s almost here. I can see a light, coming this way. The rail tracks are vibrating. I’d say this is almost certainly a real train. But it . . . feels wrong.”

  “Then get the hell back here with the rest of us!” said JC.

  Happy seemed to suddenly realise where he was. He sprinted back down the platform, not stopping until he was safely past JC and Melody, and had put the rack of instruments between him and the on-coming train. “Sorry about that,” he said breathlessly. “You can’t take as many pills as I do to make you brave and fearless without losing some of your self-preservation instincts. And they turn your piss orange.”

  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 tunnel-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 m
e 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.