Ghost of a Chance Read online

  He couldn’t connect with any of the Institute’s female field agents. They were too competitive, or too traumatised, or too haunted . . . there was always something. So JC lived alone and told himself he preferred it that way. He kept himself as busy as possible, so he wouldn’t have to tell himself that too often.

  He did love his work. It was fascinating. Always something new.

  Genuinely intrigued and delighted, he watched the posters change. His work never let him down.

  Further away from JC than simple distance could account for, Happy went bouncing through empty white-tiled corridors, peering this way and that with wide, wondering eyes. He’d dosed himself with a wide variety of pills, and he was really rocking and rolling by then. There was a spring in his step and iron in his spine, and his thoughts were racing at a thousand miles a second. His experienced brain could handle a dozen conflicting chemistries at once and still know which way was up. Happy was grinning fiercely, his eyes barely blinking at all, and he was waiting for something nasty to show itself, so he could leap on it with loud cries and wrestle it to the ground before giving it a good kicking.

  A properly medicated Happy could walk up to a banshee and ask if it knew any show tunes.

  His psychic shields were still firmly in place, not even touched by the various chemicals fighting it out for supremacy in his battered grey cells. Happy took drugs to give him an edge, not to hide behind. Or at least, that was what he told himself.

  He stopped at an intersection and spun round and round on his toes, his head up as though testing the air, listening for sounds only he could hear. He’d been nagged for some time by a constant feeling there was someone behind him; but no matter how quickly he turned around, there was never anyone there. Happy reined in his raging thoughts with an iron will unsuspected by the rest of his team and stood very still. There was definitely someone, or something, down in the corridors with him. He didn’t need his telepathy to tell him that. He sniffed loudly, giggled briefly, and rubbed his dry hands together. It was times like this he wished he carried a really big gun. Or even a really big stick. With nails in it.

  Many people asked, and not a few demanded to know, why Happy needed to take so many pills. A few, with some experience of telepathy, said they understood; but they didn’t, really. Happy only ever took what he needed to make himself brave, smart, or strong enough to be able to do his job properly, so he could strike back at those aspects of the world that had made his life such a misery from an early age.

  Revenge is always the best comfort.

  At home he ate, slept, and watched television, just like anybody else. Drugged himself with the routine and the ordinary and the everyday. He couldn’t afford to be doped up all the time. Couldn’t afford to bliss out and dream his life away. Because Happy knew what else lived in the world alongside the rest of us. He needed to be prepared. Because you never knew when something might be sneaking up on you from behind.

  No friends, no lovers, no love. Because he could never share his world with anyone. It wouldn’t be fair.

  Happy looked around, and the corridors stretched away in every direction, impossibly long, openly threatening. Happy laughed out loud and clapped his hands together, the sound almost shockingly loud in the quiet.

  “You can’t get me!” said Happy, in a loud breathy voice. “You can’t even touch me because I’m not really here. I’m armoured up, and ninety degrees from reality, far beyond your reach. So come on out and give me your best shot; and I’ll laugh right in your face. How do you like them apples, Casper?”

  The corridors lay open and silent before him, but Happy knew someone was listening. Checking him out, from a distance. Happy wondered what it made of him and his altered state of consciousness. Maybe it was scared of him. That would be fun. Ghosts were quite simple things, really; if they couldn’t scare you, they were usually lost for an alternative. So Happy set off down the nearest corridor, full of chemical good cheer and hardly shaking at all, medicinally armed against anything the unknown could throw at him.

  Happy liked to think of himself as the last of the Untouchables.

  Back on the southbound platform, Melody struggled with her precious equipment, trying through expert intimidation and sheer force of personality to make the damned things do what they were supposed to. She bent over the computer keyboards, staring right into the monitor screens, coaxing and cursing them in the same half-conscious murmur. Melody dealt in hard facts and felt helpless and vulnerable without them. She’d approached the Carnacki Institute in the first place because all her researches had convinced her that only the Institute could provide her with answers to questions no-one else would even discuss. She’d hoped for a nice quiet life in some nice quiet Institute Library; instead, they made her a field agent and sent her out into the world to find her own answers. Typically, her experiences in the field had only provided her with a whole new set of questions.

  Still, her position did give her access to cutting-edge, state-of-the-art technology, and that made up for a lot. The instruments ranged before her could break down and analyse events and energies that most scientists wouldn’t even admit existed. Of course, that wasn’t enough for Melody Chambers. She didn’t only want to know what existed in the hidden corners of the world; she wanted, needed, to understand how they worked and why. Melody hated a mystery.

  Some nights, lying on her back in the dark with an exhausted lover slumbering beside her, Melody dreamed of a special Nobel Prize, just for her, awarded for her unprecedented advances in the field of the so-called supernatural. The first woman to make the unseen world make sense.

  She worked furiously, her fierce gaze tracking impatiently from one screen to another, following the flow of information with quick jerky movements of her head. Although she’d never admit it, she always hated this part of the mission, where the other two went off on their own to see what there was to see and left her behind, on her own, to see things second hand through her instruments. She didn’t like being left on her own. Like the girl who tags around after a boys’ gang, and always gets dumped at the first opportunity. She felt better when there was someone else around. Someone close at hand. They didn’t have to be right there with her; just . . . around. So she could call on them for . . . assistance, if she wanted to.

  She felt the same way sometimes when she was alone in her little flat. No matter how many other people had been through it.

  Happy and JC returned at the end of the agreed hour, making a certain amount of noise so Melody could be sure it was them coming and not get over-eager with her machine-pistol. None of them had anything specific to report, and the more closely Melody questioned the men about what they’d seen and encountered, the more vague their answers became. And when they questioned her, Melody was forced to admit that while her machines were providing her with more sensor readings than she could keep track of, she had nothing useful to contribute either.

  “I’m picking up ghosts everywhere,” she said quickly, in self-defence. “I’ve never seen so many hauntings in one place. No actual personality or surviving intent in most of them; only images from the Past, impressed on Time by the extreme conditions of their creation. Snapshots of what was, repeating loops of history, preserved like insects trapped in amber. Presumably drawing energy from our other-dimensional Intruder. Unless they’ve been stirred up by our presence. Or my machines.”

  “She doesn’t know what’s going on either,” Happy said to JC, smiling widely.

  JC looked at the state of Happy’s pupils and sighed audibly. “Tell me at least you haven’t touched the little yellow pills, Happy. You know what happens when you take the little yellow ones.”

  “Not yet,” Happy said cheerfully. “But it’s probably only a matter of time. I always get a bit jumpy when the ghosts start manifesting. In case one of them takes a fancy to me and follows me home like a stray dog. I’m probably the only ghost finder in the Carnacki Institute with his own exorcist on speed dial.”

  �
�I wouldn’t worry,” said Melody. “They’d soon leave, once they got to know you.”

  “How very unkind,” said Happy, trying for wounded dignity, then ruining it with a sudden hiccup.

  “Never get personally involved with a ghost,” JC said sternly. “No matter how tragic its story. Nothing good can ever come of it.”

  “Damn, I’m peckish,” Happy said abruptly. “I’d kill for a curry and chips.”

  He wandered over to a nearby vending machine, studied the display of snacks on offer with owlish eyes, and made his selection. He forced money into the slot, then bounced up and down before the machine, humming an old Smiths’ song. The machine chuntered quietly to itself for a while, then a slot opened in the front and the food shot out. Happy actually had the thing half-way to his mouth before he realised something was wrong. He stopped at the last moment, his eyes widened, and his mouth pursed up in disgust as he saw what he was holding. The pastry slip was hot and steaming, but the meat oozing out of it was rotten and decaying. Maggots burst out of the pastry, writhing and roiling. Happy cried out and threw the stinking mess on the floor. It hit with a wet, slapping sound, and Happy stamped on it again and again, making shrill distressed noises, until all the maggots were crushed and dead, and nothing was moving. Then he scraped the bottom of his shoe against the platform and rubbed both hands hard on his jeans.

  “Okay, that was interesting,” said Melody. “There’s no way that could have happened naturally.”

  “No!” said Happy. “Really? You do amaze me. Of course it didn’t happen naturally! Oh, my comfortable glow is all shot to hell now. My anus has puckered itself all the way up to my chest bone.”

  “Far too much information, Happy,” murmured JC.

  “There’s no way the food could have decayed that quickly inside the machine, under normal conditions,” said Melody. “Whatever it is that’s down here, it’s draining the living energy out of everything within reach. Presumably our Intruder needs help in maintaining its hold on our dimension.”

  “You’re going to try and explain entropy to me again, aren’t you?” said Happy. “Please, JC, don’t let her explain entropy to me again. My head still hurts from the last time.”

  “Hush, man,” said JC. “It would seem our Intruder is accumulating power and adjusting local conditions to suit its own needs. But to what end, what purpose? Why does it need a physical presence in our world? What’s it all about?”

  “My name is not Alfie,” Happy said sternly.

  Melody checked her instrument panels again. “I can tell you this; there’s more than one centre down here, more than one power source. The energy readings are off the scale in a dozen different locations. If I’m interpreting these data correctly . . . we’ve got ghosts, demons, and abhuman creatures swarming all over this station. Drawn here, like moths to a flame . . . or tourists to a disaster site. Something very big, and very bad, is slowly coming into focus here. Once it’s fully manifested in our material plane, it will have established a beachhead, a door between its dimension and ours . . . one we might not be able to force shut again. In which case, the haunting would spread, and the whole of London would get hit by the psychic fall-out.”

  “Damn,” said JC. “And I thought Happy was the gloomy one.”

  “And,” said Melody, “I’m pretty sure . . . we’re not the only living people down here. Someone else is down here with us.”

  FOUR

  TWO MONSTERS AND A GHOST

  Whereas the Carnacki Institute is concerned with gathering knowledge of the unseen world in order to protect Humanity, the Crowley Project doesn’t give a damn. All they care about is amassing knowledge and power for the sake of the Project. They only investigate hauntings so they can take advantage of the situation and exploit it for their own ends. Some say they want to rule the world, and some say they already do. The Crowley Project loot and brutalise all the manifestations of the unseen world because they want to know the secrets of Life and Death. They want to rule not only this world but the afterworlds, too. They want it all.

  Some of them eat ghosts, consuming their energies and absorbing their knowledge and memories. Some of them create bad places on purpose, poisoning the psychic wells of the world with awful technologies and bad intent, dropping bloody bait into the waters to attract otherworldly monsters. For the fun of it, and the sport. They create disasters and glory in destruction, and dance in the aisles of crashing planes. Just because they can. Do what thou wilt is the whole of their law. They are the main rivals and deadly enemies of the Carnacki Institute, and so it has been for centuries. Because the Light must always be at war with the Dark, or because Good and Evil simply cannot abide each other; or maybe because every coin must have two sides. Two organisations, forever at each other’s throats; two small fish in a pond that is so much bigger than either of them have ever realised.

  Field agents Natasha Chang and Erik Grossman have come to Oxford Circus Tube Station on behalf of the Crowley Project. And they’re not there for the ghosts.

  Natasha Chang was a self-made femme fatale, her bright eyes and merry smile a cover for a cutting edge and a concealed agenda. A beautiful creature in her late twenties, she had artfully bobbed dark hair, dark, slanted eyes, and an even darker heart. Daddy was a corrupt Hong Kong businessman with a thing for the English aristocracy, who fled Hong Kong in a hurry, one step ahead of the police and all the people he’d cheated and betrayed. He brought his considerable fortune to the United Kingdom and married a very minor member of a very old family, who needed the money. Daughter Natasha grew up half-Chinese, half-English rose, privileged and cosseted but still looked down on as a half-breed by all her peers at school. She emerged from that venerable institution driven to win at any cost. The coldly ruthless child of cold and ruthless parents, Natasha struck out for freedom and an independent income at an early age. By helping Mummy murder Daddy when she was fourteen years old. She could have spent the rest of her life partying, pampering and indulging herself; but that wasn’t enough for Natasha. There were slights to be avenged. She ached to be out in the world, doing things. Bad things, preferably. Because every femme fatale needs more-and-more-difficult objectives to test herself against, to reassure herself that no-one runs her life but her.

  Natasha cultivated an arrogant aristocratic poise that never failed to fascinate and intimidate those around her, and she strode through the world as though she fully intended to walk right over anyone who didn’t get out of her way fast enough. A lot of men found that attractive, and a challenge, as they were supposed to, the fools. Natasha’s mixed-race background gave her an exotic air that she exploited mercilessly in affairs of the heart. She’d been married three times and widowed four. (That last one took a lot of killing.) She wore the very best clothes by the very best designers and never looked less than stunning. Because for Natasha, her beauty was another weapon she could use. Currently, her make-up was bold and striking, with subtle Egyptian touches around the eyes; her long, sharp fingernails were painted with real gold leaf; and she wore enough heavy rings on both hands for them to qualify as knuckle-dusters. She was wearing a pink leather cat suit, her favourite, because she had seen Eleanor Bron wear one in the Beatles movie Help! at an impressionable age.

  She was also a gifted telepath. She’d won that ability in the divorce settlement from her first husband.

  Erik Grossman couldn’t have passed for a beautiful creature in a dark room during a total eclipse of the sun. A rogue scientist and self-made mad doctor in his early thirties, Erik had been banned from universities all over Europe for his unorthodox and unethical medical experiments. At the last count, Interpol had arrest warrants out for him under eleven different names. Erik had his own private gallery of Wanted posters with his face on them, the one touch of personal vanity he allowed himself. Erik’s problem was that he saw the human body as a series of fascinating but inherently flawed and inefficient mechanisms; and he couldn’t resist the urge to tinker and try to improve them. To begi
n with, he cut bodies open and committed terrible, ruthless surgeries on what he found there. When that didn’t work, or didn’t work well enough to satisfy him, he moved on to cybernetics and the brutal introduction of technology into living bodies. And, occasionally, vice versa.

  Erik’s other problem was that he couldn’t always be bothered to find properly willing subjects. So he used stray animals and homeless people, along with drugs and machines and techniques he was forced to create in his own very private laboratories because they didn’t exist anywhere else. He had his successes and his failures, but he wasn’t nearly as efficient as he should have been in disposing of the remains. Erik was on the run, hunted across Europe by a dozen different organisations, when the Crowley Project found him and lured him to its cold bosom with the offer of well-stocked laboratories, cutting-edge technology, and more untraceable animal and human test subjects than he could shake a scalpel at. In return, of course, for his exclusive services.

  Erik wasn’t cruel, as such—unlike Natasha. He didn’t care enough about his subjects to feel anything for them. They were only raw materials. For him, the end was everything.

  He wasn’t much to look at. Medium height, a bit podgy, with flat blond hair and pale blue eyes. People found his presence disturbing because on some level they could sense they meant nothing to him. There was less human feeling in Erik than in many of the ghosts he pursued. He tended to slide and shuffle along, head down, as though always half-expecting to be shouted at, or struck. But when his eyes came up, they were always fierce and angry, a man rehearsing his revenges against an indifferent and ungrateful world. He did have feelings. But typically, he only wanted the things and people he couldn’t have, to justify his doing terrible things to those who denied him what he wanted. This was obvious to many people, but no-one had ever been foolish enough to tell him. It wouldn’t have been safe.