Simon Green - Spirits from Beyond

“At last,” said Lud. “A voice calls out to me. A human voice. . I remember the way things used to be, when all of Britain bowed down to me and burned for me. Life and death at my command, and at my whim. Worship to sustain me and purpose to give me a reason to go on. But all that passed, and I fell away, to become so much less than I was. Now. . I see the world above, and I see a world with no room in it for such as me. And there is nothing down here that I would wish to be a part of. So let me go. Break the chains that hold me to this city, this London, that I no longer recognise nor understand. Let me go wherever gods go when they die.”

“Fair enough,” said JC. He gathered up all the strength generated by the binding of the four Ghost Finders, locked in harness with him, and reached out in a direction he could sense, if not understand. A great Door appeared in the amphitheatre, beside the great throne. A Door into the Hereafter. And Lud stood up. He reached out a huge grey hand and ripped all the flesh off the Druids watching from the stone forest. The given flesh flew away from the old bones, burned in mid air, and was consumed long before it ever reached Lud. The new flesh that The Flesh Undying had provided. . gone in a moment, leaving nothing behind but old bones, lying scattered on the forest floor. Lud had taken the flesh of his worshippers and burned it in sacrifice to himself, to raise the power he needed, to do the thing he needed to do.

He opened the Door. It swung smoothly open before him, and a great light spilled out, forcing back the darkness. Lud shrunk suddenly, falling in on himself in fits and starts, until he was of a proper size to walk through the Door. The light was so bright that JC and Kim, Happy and Melody, had to turn their heads aside, unable to face it. The old god paused, on the very threshold of the Door, and looked back at them.

“I see the touch of Outside upon you all. Something reached into your world, from my homelands, and altered you according to its purposes. Something like me. That is what has made this moment possible. Like calls to like. . and pays its debts. I owe you a debt; so call on me, one last time, when you have need. . But beware gods bearing gifts; none of you were ever meant to burn this brightly. Be careful of what such a light attracts. .”

Lud strode through the Door, and it closed behind him, and was gone. The Ghost Finders fell apart and fell back into their own heads.

When they finally got their thoughts straight again, and looked, Lud was still sitting on his throne. Or at least his body was. The shape he’d made, so he could be worshipped and adored by the little human creatures. It looked a lot more like a statue now: grey and dusty, with cracks all over it.

“That’s it?” said Happy, rubbing at his aching forehead in a bemused kind of way. “No more trap? We’re all safe now?”

“Yes,” said Kim. “For now.”

* * *

They retraced their steps, back through the stone trees, kicking bones aside as they went. Back through the stone catacombs, heading for the surface. Back through London Undertowen to the world above. JC and Kim stuck close together, or as close as they could get without touching. They talked happily together, half-intoxicated with each other’s presence. Melody made a point of walking alone, swinging her machine-pistol moodily at her side, staring straight ahead. Happy didn’t even notice, tripping lightly along, sorting through the contents of his head.

“If you love me, JC,” said Kim. “If you really love me, don’t ask me where I’ve been, or what I’ve done. What I had to do, to get back to you. I will tell you, someday. When I’m ready. When you’re ready.”

“You can tell me anything, Kim,” said JC. “You know that.”

“Yes,” said the ghost girl. “But not yet.”

Everyone else wanted to go home and get some rest. But JC was the man behind the wheel, and he insisted on driving them all the way across London, to the Carnacki Institute’s Secret Libraries. So Happy and Melody slumped down in the back seat and sulked, while Kim hovered serenely an inch or so above the seat next to JC. She had to concentrate, to keep her spirit self moving along at the same speed as the car because the physical world no longer had any hold over her. She could have teleported straight to the Secret Libraries and waited for the rest of them to catch up; but being only recently reunited with JC, she was loath to leave him even for a moment. JC stared straight ahead, lost in his own roiling thoughts. It was one thing to feel under threat from so many directions at once when it was just him, or his team; they’d always been able to look after themselves. But now that Kim was back, he felt an added responsibility. He needed information on how best to defend himself and on exactly who or what he was defending himself against. And for that, he needed the Secret Libraries.

Often called the Unofficial Record, because the books in the Secret Libraries covered everything in the world that didn’t officially exist, or shouldn’t exist but unfortunately did.

JC’s Boss, the redoubtable Catherine Latimer herself, had given him password access to the Libraries sometime back; and he wasn’t prepared to wait for an official security upgrade any longer. He was fed up guessing and theorising; he wanted to know. So he aimed his car like a bullet through the empty streets of early-morning London, heading for the south-east of the city and the Woolwich Arsenal. The Secret Libraries were located directly below the Arsenal itself, presumably so that if they ever came under direct attack, the Army would already be there to defend them.

The streets didn’t stay empty for long. In fact, JC barely had Chimera House in his rear-view mirror before vehicles came pouring in from every side street at once, and the road filled up with regular early-hours traffic. Buses and taxis, newspaper deliveries and food trucks, and people coming and going as shifts ended and started. Almost immediately, JC was forced down to a merely legal speed and method of driving. There wasn’t enough room on the roads for anything else. JC scowled fiercely. Clearly someone had gone to great lengths to keep the traffic away from Chimera House and its environs, to make sure that what happened there would remain private, unobserved, and uninterrupted. But who had enough power, or influence, to shut down a whole section of London? Presumably someone inside the Carnacki Institute itself. . JC made the mistake of musing on that one aloud and was immediately hit with loud reactions from the rest of his team.

“I don’t care!” Happy said flatly. “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Don’t want to go to the Secret Libraries, either. Want to go home. My system’s crashing, I feel awful, and I am currently sweating chemicals so corrosive they will almost certainly eat holes in your leather upholstery. And I’m getting car-sick. Please can we go home? Pretty please? Can’t the Libraries wait?”

“You used to say you would sacrifice a whole bus load of blind orphans for one peek inside the Institute’s Secret Libraries,” JC said calmly. “All those years of rabid paranoia, and saying the truth is out there. . Well, the truth is out there, out in Woolwich Arsenal, and I’m taking you right to it. You always said They were out to get you; here’s your chance to get Their home address and personal-contact details. So you can sneak up on them and do appalling things in revenge.”

“Let Them finish me off,” said Happy. “The way I feel now, it would be a mercy killing.”

JC glanced at Melody in his rear-view mirror, expecting support; but she sat stiffly upright with her arms tightly folded, staring straight ahead and saying nothing. She was in a mood. She wasn’t talking to Happy, making that very clear by giving him as much space as possible on the back seat; and from the look on her face, she didn’t feel at all inclined to join in the conversation. JC sighed, quietly, and looked at Kim, who smiled sweetly back at him. She was currently manifesting as a Flapper girl, a bright young thing from the 1920s, complete with canary yellow dress, a long string of beads, and cute little cloche hat. Since Kim’s appearance was composed entirely of ectoplasm, she could change the details of her look on a whim and frequently did.