Simon Green - Ghost of a Chance

“Well, yes,” said Happy. “But it still took me ages before I could look into my mirror without expecting to see him standing behind me, peering over my shoulder, and smiling .”

“But it worked,” JC said firmly. “Just like my brilliant gambit at the supermarket, this morning. We can do this, people.”

Happy wouldn’t look at him. “I wish it was that simple, JC. I really do. But there’s something down here with us, and I don’t think we’ve ever met anything like it before. There are . . . Things, Powers, at work in the afterworlds. Some Good, some Bad, some so far beyond us we can’t even hope to understand their motivations and purposes. Sometimes they help us, sometimes they interfere, and sometimes they send us down to Hell with a nudge and a laugh. It isn’t the ghosts we have to fear; it’s the things that make ghosts.”

“Happy, you really are a first-class gloomy bugger,” JC said affectionately. “You could gloom for the Olympics, and still take a Bronze in existential paranoia.”

“Everyone has to be good at something,” said Happy, smiling a little in spite of himself. “But don’t change the subject . . .”

“Happy, you can believe in whatever you want,” said JC, cutting him off with an upraised hand. “As long as it doesn’t get in the way of doing the job. We are not here to take part in some mystic war between Absolute Powers from the Outer Realms. We are here to solve a haunting and put everyone and everything to rest again. That’s what we do.”

“I swear, you two argue like an old married couple,” said Melody. “And it’s interfering with some of my more sensitive instruments. Go take a walk around, check out the other platforms, look for clues or something, and leave me in peace to get on with my work. Stick your phones in your ears, and I’ll give you a yell when I have something definite to tell you.”

JC looked at her carefully. “Are you sure, Melody?”

“Of course I’m sure. Off you go. I can cope.”

JC nodded. “We won’t be long.” He grinned at Happy. “Exploring time! We need to take a look at the other platforms, see if they all feel the same as this. You check out the rest of the southbound lines, and I’ll take the northbound. Keep in touch, and report back here in an hour, whether you’ve found anything or not.”

Happy’s eyes got really big. “Are you kidding? Are you out of your mind? You want me to go wandering around this place on my own ?”

“Yes,” said JC. “What’s the matter? You want someone to hold your hand?”

“Yes!” said Happy. “Preferably someone I know.”

“Go,” JC said sternly. “Be a big brave ghost finder, and there’ll be honey for tea.”

He waved one elegant hand around and strolled away, humming a merry tune. Happy made a really vile gesture at JC’s immaculate back, produced a bottle of pills from nowhere, and defiantly dry swallowed three of mother’s little helpers, one after the other. He looked at Melody, but she was making a point of giving all her attention to the equipment ranged before her. Happy sighed, and his shoulders slumped. He shuffled towards the exit arch, like a small boy on his way to school, knowing that the school bully was waiting.

They thought he was scared all the time because he was a coward. The truth was, only he could see the world clearly enough to know how truly scary it was. He saw things and heard things, and every single one of them was real. Horribly real. If Humanity knew what they shared the world with, what walked their streets by day and snuggled up beside them at night; if they could see it all, just for a moment . . . they’d all go stark staring mad. Happy had learned long ago not to talk about it. People didn’t want to know. But he had no choice. If the Boss knew what he faced every day, she’d give him a medal. Or, if she was really feeling kind, a lobotomy. And maybe then he’d get some peace at last.

Ghosts are the only ones who never have to feel scared. Because the worst thing in the world has already happened to them.

It didn’t take JC long to decide that the whole of the Oxford Circus Tube Station was infected. Everywhere he looked, something looked disturbed, subtly alien. It was hard to judge distances in the unrelentingly fierce light. He walked down one platform for ages, without reaching its end. Eventually he had no choice but to turn around and go back; and there was the exit he’d come in by, waiting for him. Directions become treacherous and signs untrustworthy. The same archway took him to a dozen different places, including one painfully over-bright corridor that twisted and turned like a maze. The angles between floor and wall seemed subtly wrong , and his head ached trying to figure out why. And what shadows there were were very dark.

He particularly didn’t like one tunnel-mouth, at the end of a certain platform. Its interior was too dark, too deep, as though it might go on forever. There was no sound, and not a trace of movement, but still he kept expecting something to come crashing out of the tunnel-mouth at any moment and sweep him helplessly away to somewhere unbearably awful. He made himself stare into the darkness until his breathing steadied and his hands stopped shaking, then he very deliberately turned his back on the tunnel-mouth and walked away, head held high.

Everywhere he went, the tunnels and platforms were full of odd sounds and weird smells, and things glimpsed out of the corner of his eye that were never there when he turned to look at them directly. He kept thinking he caught glimpses of people, turning the corner ahead of him, or peering briefly out of open archways, but they were never there when he arrived. And though he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, there was something subtly wrong about these people that disturbed him strangely on some deep unconscious level.

As though there was something obscurely loathsome about them that he ought to know, ought to recognise. While he still had time.

JC strode up and down the white-tiled corridors, investigated every platform, and made a point of peering into every single tunnel-mouth. The adrenaline was really buzzing now, and he was grinning widely. He was walking alone, into the face of danger and the heart of the unknown, and he couldn’t have been happier. On every case, he couldn’t wait for the overture to begin, for a chance to come face-to-face with something he’d never seen before. It was the only reason he stayed with the Institute. He couldn’t wait for the supernatural to start its act, reveal its hidden hand, for good or bad, so he could roll up his sleeves and get stuck in. Because once he was actually doing something, he’d be too busy to feel scared.

For all his studiedly calm exterior, JC knew enough about his job to be sensibly cautious. But he also knew, or thought he knew, enough about the situations he faced every day . . . to be pretty sure of what needed doing to put things right. He knew things, had taught himself things, that the rest of his team never knew about, and that the Boss would almost certainly not approve of. JC believed in being prepared, and very heavily armed, at all times; and some of the things he carried in the inner pockets of his marvellous cream suit were officially banned by the Geneva Convention. (Supernatural and Weird Happenings Section.)

He stopped abruptly, half-way down a platform, and looked around. He was almost certain he’d been there before; but everywhere he looked, things seemed subtly different . As though certain details were changing, in slow and sneaky ways, right before his eyes. Someone was playing tricks on him. He walked slowly forward, and the posters on the wall beside him stirred lazily, the details seeming to blur and shimmer, rearranging themselves before his eyes. An ad for the new James Bond movie was suddenly an old propaganda poster from World War II, when whole families huddled together deep in the Underground, sheltering from the bombs of the Blitz. A simple cartoon, backed up by a government admonition to keep your mouth shut in case of spies: Be Like Dad; Keep Mum. The cartoon father-figure turned its simple head and winked an eye at JC. Blood ran from its mouth.