Spirits from Beyond g-4 Read online

  The three Ghost Finders stuck close together, looking the area over with professionally discerning eyes. None of them had been back here since the distressing Affair of the New People. Which. . could have gone better. Chimera House still dominated the area, a massive steel-and-glass business edifice towering over the open square before it. The square itself felt cold and empty, laid out under an open night sky full of stars, and a pale full moon. The main illumination was the unwavering flat amber light from the street-lamps.

  Everything had been carefully cleared up since the great battle of Chimera House. No sign anywhere of the great cracks in the ground or the shattered windows in the surrounding buildings. All the blood and bodies gathered up and spirited away. . Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make it all seem as if nothing happened.

  Chimera House itself stood silent and empty. No lights on anywhere, and heavy steel chains hung from the closed front doors. No-one allowed in or out, by order; and if you were wise, you didn’t ask on whose order. JC looked the building over carefully. He couldn’t avoid an uncomfortable feeling that the building was looking back at him. And not in a good way.

  “Shouldn’t there be guards outside that building?” said Happy. “I mean, armed guards, heavily armed, to make sure no-one messes with whatever’s left inside?”

  “Chimera House was supposed to be pulled down,” JC said steadily. “Completely destroyed, reduced to rubble, and built over because of all the really bad things that happened inside it. More than enough to make the entire building a strange attractor, drawing in nasty people, and things, from all around. So I have to ask: why is it still here?”

  “You should keep up on your interdepartmental memos,” said Melody. “Somebody very high up on the food chain over-ruled the Carnacki Institute. And I mean someone with really impressive clout. They insisted on preserving the building until a full investigative study could be performed on its contents. The Boss was mad as hell. Took her argument all the way to the top. And got nowhere.”

  “Are we talking political or business clout?” said Happy.

  “Yes,” said Melody.

  “Ah,” said Happy.

  “Pretty much the same thing, at that level,” said JC. “What was the name of the big company in charge of the medical experiments that went wrong, in Chimera House?”

  “Mutable Solutions Incorporated,” said Melody. “One of the biggest drug companies in the world. Where does the eight-hundred-pound drug company sit? Anywhere it wants. .”

  “But what good does it do them, keeping Chimera House intact?” said Happy. “No-one will be able to work in it for ages. It’ll take years, more likely decades, to get the psychic stains out. You’ve heard of Sick Building Syndrome; well, Chimera House is the psychic equivalent of the Ebola virus. That whole building is crazy on a stick, waiting to happen.”

  JC couldn’t help noticing that Happy didn’t even want to look at Chimera House as he spoke. They could all hear the open strain in the telepath’s voice.

  “Maybe what happened inside the building is what makes it valuable,” said JC. “Valuable to The Flesh Undying, or its agents. . Maybe it wants to maintain bad places, to make weak points in the walls of the world, so it can break out and get back where it came from.”

  “Don’t you start,” Melody said firmly. “It’s bad enough having to live with a paranoid depressive, without having two of them on the team.”

  “I don’t like it here!” Happy said loudly. “I feel. . vulnerable. Like a target. Like I’m standing at ground zero, right in the middle of a bloody big bull’s-eye. With a target painted on my forehead.”

  “Will you please calm the hell down!” said Melody, waving her hand scanner around. “There’s no-one else here!”

  “There’s always something here,” said Happy. “We’re never alone, wherever we are. The world is packed full. . I can See things, feel things. . I want to get out of here!”

  “We’re not going anywhere until Kim turns up!” JC said firmly. “However long that takes. Get a grip on yourself, Happy. This isn’t your first time at the rodeo.”

  Happy sniffed miserably and stared determinedly down at his shoes. “Still want to know why there aren’t any guards.”

  “He may be paranoid, but he has a point,” said Melody. “I’m pretty sure that was a condition on the building being allowed to stand. So where are they?”

  “Someone must have called them off,” said JC. “Which implies. . someone knew we were coming here before we did.”

  The three of them stood close together. It was still the early hours of morning, cold and quiet and empty. No sign of the living, or the dead. But not exactly peaceful. JC and Happy and Melody hugged themselves against the chill and stamped their feet hard on the ground to keep warm.

  “This is just like last time,” said Melody.

  “Bloody better not be,” said Happy. “We were lucky to come out of that mission with all our important parts still attached. Dead men walking, insane doctors with cutty things, rogue transplant organs on the loose, Gog and Magog and the New People. . We should get danger money. We should get unionised!” He scowled about him, still carefully avoiding looking at Chimera House. “I never thought it would be like this when the time came to get Kim back. I thought we’d have to storm some kind of castle, fight some monsters, to win back our lost princess.”

  JC smiled at him. “You would, too, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course!” said Happy, surprised and even a little outraged that JC could think otherwise. “She might be your girl-friend, but she’s our team-mate, too.”

  “Damn right,” said Melody. She draped an affectionate arm across Happy’s shoulders. “He’s very sentimental, on the quiet.”

  “Of course,” said Happy. “There are limits. I’m giving Kim ten more minutes, then I’m going back to wait in the car. With the heater full on.”

  “Sentimental, but practical,” said Melody. And then she stopped, grabbed Happy by the chin, and jerked his head around, so she could look him straight in the eye. “Happy, what is wrong with you? You’re shaking all over, and it isn’t from the cold. Are the psychic impressions here really that bad?”

  “This whole area is saturated with weird energies,” said Happy, jerking his chin free. “And I mean, really strange stuff. It’s all information, you see, soaked into the surface of the world, radiating back and forth like emergency broadcasts from Heaven and Hell. . And it’s getting more difficult all the time to keep it outside my head.”

  Melody checked the readings on her scanner again. “I’m not picking up anything I’d consider. . out of the ordinary.”

  “Science is limited,” said Happy. “Science deals with the surface of the world, not what’s Below or Above.”

  “Compared to your marvellous mutant mind, I suppose,” said Melody, testily.

  “Yes,” said Happy.

  “Oh come on,” said JC. “It can’t be that bad. I See stuff too, sometimes, but. .”

  He broke off. Happy was glaring at him.

  “You never get it, do you? What it’s like to See the world as it really is, all the time, to know what’s really going on, all around us. All right! See the world through my eyes, for once!”

  He grabbed JC and Melody by the arms; and immediately, all three of their minds were linked tightly together by the sheer force and power of Happy’s telepathy. He couldn’t have done it with anyone else; but the three of them had linked before. They weren’t just everyday Ghost Finders, after all.

  The everyday view of London in the morning disappeared, replaced, or rather overwritten, by a larger view. The world around them was suddenly packed full of life and death, Heaven and Hell, and everything in between. Overlapping layers of spiritual and spatial dimensions, interspersed with spiralling moments of Time. Past, Present, and any number of Futures, all happening at once. Ghosts coming and going, following paths that didn’t exist any longer in the physical world. Stone tapes everywhere, ghostly imag
es imprinted on their surroundings, playing back loops of repeating Time, over and over again.

  JC almost cried out, as he saw old images of the A team who died inside Chimera House. Jeremy Diego, Monica Odini, Ivar ap Owen. Legends in their field; caught by surprise and killed in a moment. Still there, held forever in a repeating moment, like insects trapped in amber. Forever going to their deaths, and not knowing it. And there was nothing JC could do to help them or even warn them.

  He’d never liked them much. Somehow, that made it worse.

  More images now, layer upon layer, with people from every period of history, all shouting at once. An endless din of dead voices. Unfinished bodies walking in and out of buildings as though they weren’t even there. Because they weren’t, once. Dead men and women walking in and out of each other, teeming like the unseen microscopic images that swarm in a drop of water. How many ghosts can dance on the head of a pin? Depends on the tune. .

  More voices, more sounds, human and inhuman. Great booming Voices, shouting at the world from Outside. Sounds that might have been screams or laughter, or human interpretations of Voices beyond our comprehension. The dead, reaching out for answers, or comfort, or simple human contact. Crying out against the dying of the light or the rising of the dark.

  Flashing images of this world and that and countless others, coming and going, superimposing themselves, turning and twisting and combining to make new things, the way two colours can mix to make a third. And always. . creatures, strange things, moving through our world from one unknowable place to another. The apparently empty open square before Chimera House was like the Grand Central Station of the supernatural. And this, JC and Melody slowly realised, was what it always looked and sounded like in Happy’s world.

  The telepath jerked his hands free from JC and Melody, breaking contact, and the world was quiet and empty and sane again.

  JC swayed on his feet, his heart hammering, struggling to win back his mental equilibrium. His face was wet with sweat. He looked at Melody; and she looked the same. They both looked at Happy, who stared back defiantly.

  “You see?” he said. “That’s what I see and hear all the time. All the things that never go away, never shut up, never leave me alone. I have to fight with everything I’ve got to keep them out of my head. So the only thoughts in my mind are my own. So I only see and hear what everyone else does. The pressure never stops, never lets up for a moment; and I get so tired, so tired. .”

  “Oh, sweetie,” said Melody. She took him in her arms and held him close; and Happy let her.

  “There’s nothing we can do to help, is there?” said JC.

  “No,” said Happy. “Though I am working on something.” He pushed Melody gently away from him. “We’re not here for me. We’re here for Kim. Where is she?”

  “Back at the Haybarn Theatre, she said she wasn’t abducted-just missing,” said JC. “That she was busy, following leads of her own. She said she saw, or experienced, something important here while she was possessing Robert Patterson; and that she had to pursue it. So where has she been all this time? And what has she been doing?”

  “Out in the world,” said the ghost girl Kim. “And walking up and down in it.”

  They all looked around sharply; and there she was, standing before them. Glowing very faintly in the gloom, her bare feet hovering an inch or two above the ground, smiling happily on them all. JC rushed forward, reaching out to take her in his arms, only to remember at the last moment. He stumbled to a halt before her, and they stood face-to-face, smiling into each other’s eyes. Lost in each other but unable to touch. After a respectful moment, Happy and Melody came forward, and Kim turned away from JC to smile on them. Happy put up a hand for a high five; and Kim put up a hand that almost touched his. Melody threw the ghost girl a quick salute, and Kim nodded in return.

  “Where have you been, Kim?” said JC.

  “I’ve been tracking down the individual who was inside Patterson’s head, before me,” said Kim. “The servant of The Flesh Undying; the secret traitor at the heart of the Carnacki Institute.”

  “Who?” said JC. “Who is it? Who are we talking about here?”

  “I can’t tell you,” said Kim. “Not yet.”

  “Why the hell not?” said JC.

  “Don’t you raise your voice to me, Josiah Charles Chance,” said Kim. “I can’t tell you because I’m protecting you. I know the name; but they can’t read my mind.”

  “They?” said Happy, his ears pricking up immediately.

  “Exactly,” said Kim.

  “Why didn’t you come back to us before this?” said Melody.

  “Because the traitor saw me,” said Kim. “Saw and knew me. And so The Flesh Undying sent its agents after me, physical and spiritual, chasing me all across the world, and Above and Under it. The living and the dead, in hot and cold pursuit. It’s taken me a long time, travelling through the sacred and profane places of the world, to shake them all off. . and to search out what I was looking for.”

  “All that matters is that you’re back,” said JC.

  “Not quite,” said Kim. “I’m sorry, JC, but we’re not alone here. Something unfriendly is here in this place with us.”

  “What?” said Happy. “What?”

  He spun quickly around in circles, as though hoping to catch something by surprise. Melody slapped her scanner with the flat of her hand again.

  “Still not picking up anything!” she said angrily. She shook the thing fiercely. “You are seriously underperforming! You can be replaced!”

  “I’m not Seeing anything!” said Happy. “I Spy with my third little eye. . nothing out of the ordinary! So to speak.”

  “The Flesh Undying knew I would reappear here,” Kim said calmly. “I had to return to this place because this is where I’d left from. Closing the circle was the only way I could come back, to the material world I left. There are rules, you see, for the dead as well as the living. Perhaps especially for the dead. And The Flesh Undying took advantage of that. It’s set a trap here, for me, and for you. It’s not too late for you to leave if that’s what you want.”

  “Never,” said JC.

  “Well, I don’t know about never,” said Happy. “But I’m here now.”

  “He’s so brave,” said Melody. “Isn’t he wonderful? Of course we’re not leaving, Kim! You’re part of the team.”

  “Then brace yourselves,” said Kim.

  JC and Melody and Happy moved quickly to stand back-to-back-to-back; so they could watch and cover all the open space around them. So nothing could sneak up on them or catch them by surprise. Melody put her scanner away and produced a machine-pistol. She swept it smoothly back and forth with professional ease, looking for a target. JC had to smile.

  “All right,” he said, “I give up. Where do you keep that gun, Melody?”

  “Trust me,” said Happy. “You don’t want to know.”

  Kim stood very still, looking at whatever ghosts looked at.

  “I can See layers of protection, still in place,” said Happy. “Laid down around Chimera House. But it’s standard off-the-shelf stuff. The kind of defences that would collapse in a moment if anything seriously demonical even leaned on them.”

  “The threat to us isn’t inside the building,” said Kim. “It’s out here, with us.”

  “Okay,” said Happy. “I am now running for the car. Try to keep up.”

  “Too late,” said Kim, sadly.

  The ground before them split violently apart-soundlessly, jaggedly. Solid stone and concrete tore like paper. The ground shook and juddered, and the three living Ghost Finders staggered back and forth, clinging to each other for support. A deep chasm opened up, stretching across the open square, full of darkness. Kim turned a stern gaze on the wide gap, and like that the ground was still again. Everything was quiet. Melody took a cautious step forward, peering down into the great dark crevasse. Happy moved in behind her, staring over her shoulder. JC looked at Kim, who looked calmly back at him.r />
  “More major structural damage, right in the heart of London’s business centre,” said Melody. “Someone’s insurance premiums are about to go right through the roof. What do you want to bet that the powers that be will find some way to blame all of this on us?”

  “No wonder the security guards were called off,” said JC. “Someone didn’t want any witnesses. .”

  “This isn’t like the last time,” Happy said slowly. “It feels different. .”

  They all eased forward, right up to the edge of the chasm, and looked down. A long range of old stone steps headed down into the darkness. Scuffed and much-used stone steps, without any banister or railing, falling away, apparently forever.

  “Impressive,” said JC.

  “They’re not real,” said Kim.

  “What?” said Happy.

  “The steps aren’t really there,” said Kim, apparently entirely unimpressed. “This is merely a transition, from one place to another. Your mind interprets what’s there as steps to make life easier for you.”

  “How come you can See that when I can’t?” said Happy, frowning hard at the steps, which still insisted on looking like steps.

  Kim smiled. “Because I’m dead. It’s very revealing, being dead. You should try it sometime.”

  “Not right now,” said JC. “We’ve got work to do.”

  Melody took out her hand-held scanner again and aimed it down into the dark chasm. Smoke immediately poured out of the machine, from every side at once, and the whole thing overheated so quickly, Melody had no choice but to throw it away before it burned her hand. It dropped away into the darkness and quickly disappeared. Happy looked at Melody but had the good sense not to say anything. JC peered dubiously into the chasm.

  “All right,” he said. “Where do these steps that aren’t actually steps go, Kim? And why do we want to go there?”

  “Hold everything,” said Melody, blowing gently on her scorched fingers. “Before we go into that, I want to know; who actually broke open the ground? Who provided this extremely dramatic transition; and who wants us to go down there, into London Undertowen?”