Simon Green - Spirits from Beyond

Voices, voices, more and more of them, entire crowds of men and women fighting to be heard. Other sounds arose in the background: what might have been fights, with broken furniture; lovers’ quarrels; the raucous singing of disreputable songs. Everything you might expect to hear from every kind of bar.

But it seemed to JC that there was something strange, something decidedly off, about these distant and disembodied voices. Many of them were oddly accented, with the kind of extreme dialects you don’t hear any more. Harshly pitched voices, speaking the kind of English that hadn’t been spoken for centuries. And as the clamour of voices rose to an uproar, JC was sure he could hear other languages mixed into the general hubbub-Norman, Saxon, Celtic, Latin-all the old lost tongues of England. And some things JC couldn’t even recognise. England’s linguistic history had always been full of strange bedfellows.

“A whole army of dead voices,” said Melody, raising her voice to make herself heard above the din. “It’s like everyone who ever patronised this pub has come back, for an after-life reunion.”

“All human life is here,” said JC. “And all human death, apparently.”

Finally, the ghosts appeared. Grim, grey, roughly human shapes, glowing with their own unnatural light as they came walking through the walls from every side at once. Some slipped in through the main door, as naturally as you please, while others came tripping down the backstairs. More and more of them, filling up the bar with their cold, spectral presence. Some rose out of the floor, while others dropped down from the ceiling, following stairways and entrances that had existed once, long ago, in earlier incarnations of the building that eventually became the King’s Arms. When it was an inn, a tavern, a meeting-house.

Melody and Happy moved quickly to stand back-to-back.

“Hold your ground,” said JC, sternly. “They’re only ghosts. We can do ghosts.”

And still they came, forcing their way in, an endless flow of the dead, walking right through the tables and chairs, and even each other. Glowing figures overlapped as they tried to occupy the same limited space, dressed in clothing and outfits and even rough armour, from a hundred different periods of Time Past. All of them talking at once, the terrible clamour rising and falling. . And yet even through the din, JC slowly became aware that he couldn’t hear any sounds of movement from the ghosts. No footsteps, no bodies jostling against each other.

And, he couldn’t fit a single voice to any particular ghost. As though the voices and the apparitions came from different places.

Melody opened her lap-top on the bar-counter and fired up. She used her scanners to pick out images from the most-recent-looking ghosts, then set them against local records, trying to put some names to the deceased faces. Hoping to work out who they were and why they’d come back. JC could tell from her face that she wasn’t having much luck.

“There’s one good thing,” said Happy.

“Really?” said Melody, without looking up from what she was doing. “Tell me. I’d love to hear it.”

“There are two faces I don’t see anywhere in this spooky crowd,” said Happy. “I don’t see Adrian Brook or his Lydia. Their spirits aren’t trapped here. They got away.”

“You’re right,” said JC. “That is a good thing. Not a terribly useful piece of information, but. .”

“I don’t do useful,” said Happy. “What do you want? Miracles?”

“Yes, please,” said JC. “I could use one if you’ve got one about you. I swear this case is wearing me down. Every time I think I’ve got it worked out, it changes gear and speeds off in another direction.”

“Hello,” said Melody. “This is interesting. .”

“In the absence of a miracle, I’ll settle for interesting,” said JC. “What have you got, Mel?”

“Look at the ghosts,” said Melody. “They’re avoiding us. According to my scanners, there’s a perfect circle around us that the ghosts aren’t entering. They actually change direction at the last moment, to avoid it.”

“Yes!” said Kim. “I can feel it. It’s you, Melody! Or, at least, you and your lap-top. You’ve established a circle of scientific reality that the ghosts can’t enter. I’m standing right at the edge of the circle, and it is weirding me out big time. As though scientific reality itself is trying to push me away because it doesn’t believe in me. It’s like a very loud voice telling me I don’t exist. If I didn’t know better, I think I’d find that very upsetting. These ghosts all around us. . they’re simply memories, trapped in this building. Slowly disintegrating, down the centuries, into little more than sound and fury and increasingly unstable images. Not really proper ghosts at all, to my mind. .”

She gestured dismissively at the ghosts as they came near, and a grey hand shot out of the crowd and fastened onto her wrist. Kim looked at the hand in shock, unable to believe anything could actually touch her. And then she was dragged sharply out of the scientific circle and hauled away into the crowding ghosts. If she did cry out, she couldn’t be heard above the raised voices.

JC immediately went to go after her, but Happy and Melody grabbed him by both arms and dragged him back. He fought them for a moment, then stopped and stood still, breathing hard. Happy and Melody let go of his arms and stepped back, and watched him anxiously.

“You have to stay in the circle, JC,” Melody said carefully. “We’re only safe from the ghosts as long as we stay inside the circle.”

“It’s all right; really!” said Happy. “It’s not like Kim’s in any danger; she’s a ghost, right? She can’t come to any harm.”

“You don’t know that,” said JC. “They were able to touch her. And ghosts can be hurt. I found that out down in the London Underground.”

“That was different!” Melody said firmly. “That was Fenris Tenebrae; these are common or garden everyday ghosts. Kim’s been around; she’s not just any ghost, now. She can take care of herself. You’re the one who might be in danger out there. We don’t know what’s going on here, JC. We have to be careful.”

JC nodded abruptly. He hadn’t actually calmed down, but he did his best to seem more in command of himself. He looked at Melody, then at her lap-top.

“Talk to me, Mel. Explain to me what’s happening. I am prepared to accept informed guesses.”

“It’s Time,” said Melody, her attention fixed on the information streaming across her lap-top screen. “Time is breaking down in the King’s Arms. As in: Time doesn’t seem to be as tightly nailed down at the corners as it ought to be. Linear Time is being disrupted, under direct attack from the sheer power of a storm that’s been building for centuries.”

JC turned to Happy. “All right, you explain it to me.”

“It’s all concerned with the terrible anger generated by the death of the blonde woman all those years ago,” said Happy. “Her sacrifice, in a local place of power, gave birth to Something the Druid priests never anticipated-a great scream of rage given shape and form and power by an unsuspected bad place. So that Something set in motion long ago is still happening. Growing, building in strength, searching for a way to break into our reality. The storm we hear. . is the smile on the face of the tiger.”

“Could you be any more vague?” said JC.

“If you want,” said Happy. “Look, the storm started long ago. Back in the Druid days. The rage of the sacrificed victim got mixed up in it and gave it focus. Something’s held it off, all these years, but now it’s back. And it’s mad. Tell me you’ve got it now, JC. Because all I’ve got left is mime and finger-painting.”