Simon Green - Ghost of a Dream

JC took off his sunglasses and stared meaningfully into the tunnel-mouth. The deep dark shadows seemed to stir uneasily under the touch of his augmented gaze. Happy stood half-crouching behind JC, concentrating, reaching out with his mind. Feeling for something that strictly speaking wasn’t actually there yet.

“You’re right, JC. There’s definitely something…almost there. A dimensional door with something very powerful pushing up against the other side. There is a light at the end of the tunnel but not necessarily in a good way.”

“Something’s coming,” JC agreed, smiling confidently. “So close now, even I can feel it. Melody! Can you tell me what direction it’s coming from?”

“According to my instruments,” said Melody, breathlessly, as she slammed the last bit of high tech into place, “whatever it is, it’s coming from every direction at once! Forget spatial coordinates; this is coming from Outside our reality. Still, if I were the betting kind, which I’m not, but if I were…the odds do favour its coming through that tunnel-mouth. Completing the journey the train began all those years ago. The Universe has a fondness for circles and neatness. But JC, I have to tell you…it’s not only the train that’s coming. Something really powerful is hitching a ride with it, something so big, so intense it’s overloading all my sensors!”

“Yes,” said Happy, almost absently, all his concentration focused on the tunnel opening. “I can See it, I can Hear it…Like a bright Light, like a great Voice…”

“The Ghost Caller,” said JC.

“The Light is shining very brightly now,” said Happy, in a far-away voice. “I don’t like it. That’s not a proper Light. And it’s not a good Voice. It wants to tell me things. Things I don’t want to know…”

“Is it calling you?” said JC, quickly.

“No,” said Happy, almost reluctantly. “It doesn’t care about me. I’m just in the way. Its attractions are not for the living. I think both the Light and the Voice are lies, lures…It calls to the dead, to trick them away from the true Light and the true Voice…”

“Okay,” said JC, surprisingly gently. “That’s enough of that. Come home, Happy. Come back to me, or I’ll have Melody come and bring you back.”

“I’m back!” said Happy, scowling at JC. “I can look after myself, you know.”

“Really,” said JC. “You do amaze me. Have we done enough to open the door?”

“Oh yeah,” said Happy, scowling at the dark tunnel opening. “All I had to do was pry at the edges, and the train did the rest. The train and what’s coming with it. Still not too late to gather up our skirts and run, you know.”

“We don’t run,” said JC. “We are the Ghost Finders, and we don’t take any shit from the Hereafter.”

“What’s this we stuff, white man?” said Happy.

“It’s close!” said Melody, staring raptly at her sensor readings. “And I mean, really close. My instruments are going crazy! In fact, one of them melted…I’m getting really weird energy spikes, other-dimensional radiations…Time and gravity and…and temperature readings that don’t make any sense in our world…Holy crap!”

She backed rapidly away from her bank of instruments as, one by one, they burst into blue-white flames, then exploded, unable to cope with what they were experiencing. Melody tried to get back, to shut everything down, but the sheer heat drove her away again. She reluctantly abandoned her precious toys and hurried down the platform to join the others. The railway lines down in the valley between the platforms were jumping and juddering, ripping free of the thick weeds that had grown around and over them. The platform vibrated fiercely under the Ghost Finders’ feet. Signs hanging on steel chains swung heavily back and forth. And all the doors in all the buildings slammed open and shut, again and again. Laurie was forced out onto the platform, looking at the tunnel-mouth with wide eyes.

Until, finally, a great light appeared in the tunnel, blasting out of the tunnel-mouth, red as all the fires of Hell; and out of that unnatural light the steam train appeared at last, thundering out of the old tunnel-mouth. It was huge and dark, with gleaming steel and brass, smoke pumping out of its chimney and its whistle screaming like a soul newly damned to the Pit. Strange-coloured sparks rose where its steel wheels met the rusting rails; and then all the wheels screamed and squealed as the brakes slammed on, and the train and its carriages bucked to a shuddering halt, all along the platform of Bradleigh Halt.

Come home, at last.

JC and Happy and Melody stood close together, looking over the steam engine and its seven carriages as they settled to a halt. There was a loud ticking of cooling metal, and great gusts of steam rose on the still, evening air. A thick viscous liquid dripped steadily from every outer surface, bubbling and boiling in reaction to Earth air and Earth conditions. Some alien substance, covering all the train, brought back from the Away place, as though the train had been born again in some strange, alien amniotic fluid. The stuff fell slowly and reluctantly away from the train, dissipating, giving up the ghost, unable to hold itself together in this new kind of world. The whole train smelled like rotting meat, like something that should have been buried long ago.

The steam still issuing in sudden spurts from the cooling engine smelled bad, too; smelled wrong, unearthly, changed. The few sparks still jumping around the great steel wheels were odd and unnatural colours. The weeds that had choked the railway lines for so long, those that hadn’t been chewed up and thrown aside by the train’s return, now curled up and withered from contact with the great steel wheels.

JC beckoned urgently to Laurie, and the old man hurried over to join him. He stared at the old steam-engine with fond, almost worshipful eyes.

“She’s everything my old grand-dad said she was,” said Laurie. “He saw her go into that tunnel, you know, back in the day. He always said she’d find her way home again, eventually.”

“Are all the carriages there?” asked JC. “Is anything missing? Is everything there that should be?”

“Oh yes,” said Laurie. “But look at the state of the engine! All that…stuff, dripping off her! It’s a disgrace…What have they done to you, girl? You were a classic!”

JC looked at Melody. “Any idea where the Ghost Caller might be?”

“All of my instruments are shot, fried, and dead in the water; but if I had to guess, I’d say probably the baggage-car.”

“Look at her,” said Laurie, softly and reverently. “Been away so long everything about her has changed. All the metals and alloys are different now…the wood of the carriages is rotting, corrupt. And what’s inside…makes my skin crawl. There’s more to this train than there should be. As though the whole thing’s alive…How can it be alive?”

“How can you tell all this?” said Happy, staring at him. “I’m a telepath, and I’m not getting half of that!”

“I can feel it,” said Laurie. “Can’t you?”

Happy scowled at the train and said nothing.

“If it is alive, it’s not any kind of life we could hope to understand,” JC said briskly. “Or would want to, probably. Question is—what forms of life might the train have brought back with it?”

“Really not liking the implications of that,” said Happy. He frowned suddenly, his whole face screwing up. “And I’m picking up something really nasty, now. Not a Light or a Voice this time, a feeling…like sticking your hand into a mess of corruption. It’s the carriages, JC! Look at the carriages…Dear God, what’s happened to the passengers?”

They all moved slowly down the platform, peering through the distorted glass of the carriage windows they passed. A strange light blazed through the windows, like the blue-green phosphorescence of underwater grottos. People clustered together inside the carriages, staring out at the world they’d come back to; but they didn’t act like people any more. Their eyes were empty, faces twisted with wild, inhuman emotions. Driven mad, every one of them, or perhaps beyond madness into something else, through being trapped for so many years in a place never meant for humankind. They beat and pattered against the closed windows with flat hands as though they’d forgotten what windows were, or what hands were for. They were all desperate to get out, crawling and swarming over each other like oversized beetles, staring out at a world they no longer recognised, with blank, insect eyes.