Simon Green - Ghost of a Dream

“What happened to them?” said Laurie. “What made these people…like this?”

“The Ghost Caller,” said JC. His voice was flat and harsh, with rigidly suppressed rage. “It’s been active, Calling, all the time it was Away. The passengers in the carriages were all killed, either by the abrupt transition to the Other Place or because they couldn’t survive in the alien conditions they found there. But the Ghost Caller wouldn’t let their spirits depart. Their souls have been trapped in their dead bodies all this time, driven insane by horrors the human mind was never meant to cope with. These are dead bodies possessed by mad ghosts.”

“How can you know all that?” said Laurie.

“I seem to feel it,” said JC, a bit dreamily. “Don’t you?”

“We can’t leave them like this,” said Laurie. “It isn’t right.”

“Of course we won’t leave them like this,” said JC, immediately all business again. “Helping the restless dead find peace is all part of our job description. But the only way to free these poor souls is to smash or destroy the Ghost Caller. Then they can pass on to their proper places, in the Hereafter.”

“Hereafter?” said Laurie. “You mean, Heaven and Hell?”

“Don’t look at me,” said Happy. “Way above my pay grade. We have enough trouble coping with the Here and Now.”

“I’m an agnostic,” said Melody. “Mostly in self-defence.”

“What matters is sending these lost souls on,” JC said firmly. “So they can be made whole and sane again.”

“I’m more concerned with what happens if the passengers get out of these carriages,” said Happy. “Those windows don’t look particularly strong, or secure.”

“If they get out?” said JC. “Nothing good, I should imagine. They have enough sense left to know a great wrong has been done them and enough anger to want revenge…”

“You know,” said Melody, “this would be a really good time for you to produce one of those really powerful and utterly forbidden weapons that you carry about your person, the ones that you’re not supposed to have.”

“The Boss made me give them all up, after the last case,” said JC. “In fact, she was most insistent about it. Had me strip-searched, and everything. And you really don’t want to know what the ‘and everything’ involved.”

“She took all your weapons ?” said Happy. “And you’re only telling us now?”

“She’s been keeping a very close eye on me,” said JC. “I’ve had to be very careful. I need the Carnacki Institute’s resources to help me search for Kim.”

“Look, do you have any nasty weapons about you or not?” said Melody.

“Not as such,” said JC.

“I want to go home,” said Happy loudly.

“Excuse me,” Laurie said firmly. “But I have to ask…is this a real train or a ghost train? I mean, is it really, physically, here?”

“Good question, Mr. Laurie,” said JC. “To which the official answer is, damned if I know. It certainly seems solid enough…Best to treat it as though it’s real, right up to the point where we decide it’s more useful to treat it as though it isn’t. We are nothing if not flexible in this business, in the face of utter horror.”

“We have to find the machine,” Melody said stubbornly. “The Ghost Caller. We have to shut it down.”

“Dear Melody, practical as ever!” JC said cheerfully. “I love it when a plan comes together, and all the options narrow to a point where decisions become inevitable. And, given that the light blazing out of the rear carriage is so much stranger and soul-numbingly disturbing than all the others, I think we can safely assume that that …is the machine, in the baggage-car. Mr. Laurie, please stay right where you are, so we don’t have to worry about you. Team Ghost Finders, follow me.”

“I’m quite happy to stay with Mr. Laurie,” said Happy.

“What?” said JC. “And miss all the fun?”

“Fun is overrated.”

“You stand a much better chance of surviving if you stick with me,” said JC.

“Right with you, boss,” said Happy, miserably.

“Go, team!” said Melody.

The three of them stuck close together as they moved slowly and cautiously down the platform, maintaining what they hoped was a safe distance from the carriages. Strange phosphorescent lights rose and fell behind the windows as though disturbed by unknown tides. The possessed dead passengers pressed up close against the bulging glass of the windows, crawling over and around each other like so many insane insects. The Ghost Finders did their best not to look at them. Some horrors are harder to bear than others. It wasn’t the passengers’ fault, what had happened to them, what had been done to them; but that didn’t make it any easier to look at. A mad soul is so much harder to consider than a mad mind. Because where sanity runs out, the Outside moves in.

It made sense to have stuck the Ghost Caller in the baggage-car, at the end of the train, as far-away from the passengers as possible; but in the end it hadn’t made any difference. JC insisted that they all walk the length of the train at a steady pace because it would have been only too easy to lose control and break into a run; and they couldn’t afford to lose control here, in these conditions, not even in the smallest of ways. The light blasting out of the baggage-car’s single grilled window was blindingly bright, incandescent almost beyond bearing, so harsh that even JC had to screw up his altered eyes to deal with it. The station gloom seemed to shrink away from the light as though it was afraid or intimidated. JC found the door to the baggage-car and tried it. Locked, of course, with an immense steel padlock. JC tore the heavy door right off its hinges and threw it aside. He pulled himself up into the new opening and entered the rear carriage. Melody and Happy looked at the thrown-aside door, lying on the platform, looked at each other, then followed JC into the baggage car.

The light was easier to bear once they got inside, as their eyes adjusted to the new conditions. It only took them a moment to recognise the Ghost Caller. It wasn’t a machine, after all. It was a human corpse, sitting upright in a stiff-backed chair, held firmly in place by a series of heavy leather straps and restraints. Even after so long Away, or perhaps because of it, the body was still perfectly intact. Not a trace of rot or decay, nor any smell of formaldehyde or any other preservative. The three Ghost Finders looked into the set grey face of the dead man and knew him immediately. It was Dr. Emil Todd. The head had been cut open, quite neatly, sawn across above the eyebrows.

JC, Melody, and Happy moved slowly forward, surrounding the corpse. There was nothing else in the carriage worth looking at. They all leaned in, to look inside the dead man’s head. There was a brain, but quite clearly it had come from someone else. It slumped to one side, not even close to fitting. A series of brass and copper wires had been threaded through the brain, to hold it in place in the oversized skull. Silver pins protruded from the pink-and-grey matter, set in strange patterns, like a grotesque pincushion. And on top of the truncated head, someone had carefully placed an ornate crown, made of silver, with a dozen human eyeballs set firmly in place at regular intervals, staring unblinkingly out at the world.

“Okay,” said Happy, breathlessly, “that is seriously creepy, and I have seen more than my fair share of creep.”

“It’s also a major disappointment,” said Melody. “I was looking forward to examining some glory of steampunk engineering, not this…messed-about abomination. What the hell is this?”

“That is my body, given in repentance for all the wrong I did,” said a new voice, behind them. They all looked around sharply, and there in the baggage-car with them was the ghost of Dr. Todd. Staring sadly at his own corpse. “This is what I gave up my life for and why I have spent my death here, trying to prevent its return. There were supposed to be protections set in place, to prevent the Ghost Caller from activating. They promised me there would be protections…A defensive circle around the chair, binding Wards and Signs carved into the wooden floor…But they lied.”