Ghost of a Chance (19 page)

JC shot her a reassuring smile. He breathed deeply, dragging air far into his lungs, gathering his strength and calming his mind. Sweat was still running down his face and stinging his eyes, and he took a moment to pull out a handkerchief and mop his face clean. Kim stared at him wildly, hardly believing he would waste time while the walls were closing in to crush him. JC put his handkerchief away with a flourish and looked left and right to check how close the walls were. The harsh grinding sound of their progress across the floor was very loud, and very near. At the speed they were moving, his death would be a slow and horrible thing, with the cracking and breaking of bones first, then the slow crushing of inner organs, as he literally died by inches. He’d probably be alive right till the end, so Kim could suffer as much as he did.

JC was really looking forward to meeting his unseen enemy and teaching it the error of its ways.

He stretched out both arms, hands splayed, as though he intended to stop the incoming walls with sheer brute strength. But JC had been trained better than that. The Institute prepared its agents to be strong in all kinds of ways. JC calmed his mind with familiar and well-rehearsed routines, drew on his inner resources, and quite simply refused to accept what was happening. The walls couldn’t be moving because the unseen enemy wasn’t strong enough to rewrite physical reality. It couldn’t be. JC defied the evidence of his senses and denied the movement of the walls through sheer strength of will. He closed his eyes and stood there with arms outstretched . . . and nothing came forward to touch his waiting hands. He slowly opened his eyes, and the corridor walls were back where they belonged as though they had never moved. Because, of course, they hadn’t. JC slowly lowered his arms. He smiled at Kim, still hanging unsupported at the end of the corridor, and she smiled back.

Inside, JC was laughing his head off. He’d bet his shirt the enemy had been bluffing, and he’d won. It wasn’t that powerful, after all. And that . . . was good to know.

He walked forward, and Kim hung there before him, dangled before him like a toy, or a lure. JC kept his approach slow and careful, not allowing himself to run to her, and his heart leapt a little when Kim didn’t move. He made himself stop a careful distance away, somehow knowing that if he tried to free her from whatever held her, she would immediately be snatched away again. So he stood before her and smiled at her, and she smiled back, and they talked in quiet, calm, rational voices.

“You have to give this up,” said Kim. “You can’t keep chasing me. It’s killing you. I don’t want that.”

“I have to run,” said JC. “I have to try. I can’t give up on you. Not so soon after finding you.”

She smiled again, but there was sadness in her eyes. “I’m afraid we found each other a little too late, my sweet. I’m dead, aren’t I? Only a ghost now, a memory of the person I once was.”

“Yes,” said JC.

“Then go back,” said Kim, kindly but firmly. “There’s no sense in both of us being dead. So far, I haven’t seen anything to recommend it. You have your whole life ahead of you. All the years that were stolen from me. So go back, find someone else, someone with a future, and love her. Forget me, and be happy.”

“I could no more forget you than I could forget me,” said JC. “It wouldn’t be living, and it wouldn’t be love if it wasn’t you.”

“Now that is crap, and you know it,” said Kim. “You hardly know me. And no-one ever really dies of a broken heart. You will forget me, and you will move on, because that’s what people do.”

“It’s not what I do,” said JC. “Don’t give up, Kim. Because I won’t. I will follow you wherever this force takes you. I will find you wherever he hides you, and I will break you free and take you up out of this place and into the light again. Because that is what I do.”

“And then what?” said Kim. “I’ll still be a ghost. What kind of life could we have together?”

JC grinned at her. “I’ll think of something. Don’t push me; I’m still working this out as I go along. Never give up hope, Kim.”

“Never,” she said.

Kim started to drift backwards again. JC went after her at his own pace, refusing to be hurried. Kim’s speed remained the same, and JC smiled inwardly. It seemed he’d achieved some measure of control over the situation.

And then she and he rounded the corner into the next passageway, and JC stopped abruptly. Kim kept going, floating slowly but steadily backwards down the corridor, her feet dangling a good few inches above the thousands of razor blades covering the floor. Jammed in sideways, their glistening sharp edges pointing upwards. Thousands of them, covering the floor from one end of the corridor to the other, blue steel gleaming brightly in the fierce electric light. Kim kept going until she reached the far end, then stopped. JC’s heart sank as he realised there was no way past the razor blades and no way round them.

His shoes wouldn’t protect him for long. The blades would slice through the soles in half a dozen steps, then there would be nothing between his feet and the razor-sharp blades. And once he fell . . . it would be a bad way to die, crawling across the razor blades, bleeding out slowly.

He looked at Kim, held motionless at the end of the corridor, and she seemed miles away. Once again the chase had been stopped, so she could watch him suffer and die because of her. This unseen enemy really did love his mind games. It was saying to Kim,
How much is this man prepared to do, how far is he prepared to go, how much will he risk to come after you?
And JC had to wonder:
Why does the enemy care? Why doesn’t it just kill me?

JC knelt before the first row of razor blades, hardened his mind against all illusion, and stretched out a single finger. The nearest steel blade sliced into his fingertip so gently he didn’t even feel it until he saw the blood welling up. Then he felt the pain and snatched his hand back to suck thoughtfully at the wounded finger. So, real blood and real pain. If this was an illusion, it was such a powerful one his body believed in it. JC frowned, concentrating, remembering how the Institute had taught him to walk barefoot across live coals. He’d protested about that very loudly at the time, demanding to know when such a thing would ever come in handy. But the Institute had insisted, and he’d learned. It was all about faith, and balance. JC smiled briefly, took a slow, calming breath, and stepped lightly up onto the first row of razor blades. He stood there, for a moment, centring himself, then walked slowly and deliberately forward across the sea of razor blades.

He took his time about it, letting each foot come down calmly and naturally, never once looking down but always straight ahead, at Kim. She was smiling widely, hardly daring to believe what she was seeing. He walked on, and it felt like walking on solid ground. He took no damage, and he felt no pain. Knowing all the time that if he flinched, or lost concentration, even for a moment, he would stumble and fall, all his weight crashing down onto the tightly packed steel blades.

And he would not rise again from a fall like that.

Thunder exploded in the narrow corridor, close and huge and deafeningly loud. The sheer sound of it vibrated in his bones and shuddered through his flesh. Lightning stabbed down out of nowhere, melting patches of razor blades into puddles of molten steel. The lightning was close enough to JC that he could feel the tingling on his skin, but it never hit him. The storm roared all around him, but he walked steadily right through the raging heart of it. The air was blisteringly hot, then bitingly cold, and Kim convulsed in the air before him, crying out as though tormented. But JC would not allow himself to be disturbed. Inside his head he was calm and serene, untouched by the untrustworthy world, his concentration fierce and unyielding. The enemy was playing games with him, and that thought made JC calmly, coldly, implacably determined to press on, rescue Kim, and take his revenges.

He came at last to the end of the corridor and stepped down from the last of the razor blades. Kim was yanked suddenly backwards, hauled out of sight around the corner into the next corridor. JC went after her. There were no more razor blades before him, and he didn’t look back. The air was still and quiet and normal. But when JC rounded the corner, the corridor ahead was packed full of spider-webs.

“Aren’t you repeating yourself?” JC said loudly, but there was no reply.

Kim hung in the air at the far end of the passage, and between her and JC, huge masses of dirty grey spider-webs filled up all the space. They hung down from the ceiling and clung to both walls: thick sticky strands, trembling slightly, and thick grey veils that pulsed slowly. And before JC, hanging in mid air, strung up in thick and nasty cocoons, were Happy and Melody. Or at least, what was left of them.

JC’s breath caught in his throat, and his heart hammered painfully in his chest, but he wouldn’t let any of it show in his face. He wouldn’t give his unseen enemy even that small satisfaction. JC moved slowly forward. Happy and Melody were both dead. They had to be dead. They were . . . shrunken, desiccated, what was left of their faces little more than skin and bone. As though all the living juices had been sucked out of them. Deep dark holes had been burrowed into their guts, great areas of flesh eaten away. As JC watched, a single dark spider pulled itself out of Happy’s empty left eye socket and scurried quickly across Happy’s unmoving features. JC stood before what was left of his good friends and colleagues, and could hardly breathe at all.

“Shut up! You aren’t dead!” JC said loudly. “You can’t be dead. I would have known. I would have felt it.”

He lurched forward, tearing the grey veils apart with his bare hands. They clung to his fingers and stuck to his face, but he brushed them roughly away and kept going. He plunged through the webbing, refusing to be slowed by it, but when he came to the two cocoons holding what was left of his friends, they remained stubbornly firm and solid, and he had to push and force his way between them. The webbing seized him from all sides, resisting his progress and tearing only slowly and reluctantly. JC pressed on, refusing to be stopped, but in that moment when he was caught between the two cocoons, shouldering them aside to get past, Happy and Melody opened their eyes and looked at him. Three dead eyes, bereft of feeling or Humanity, but full of awful, hard-won knowledge. JC paused despite himself, and Happy and Melody spoke to him in the soft whispering voices of the dead.

“I hate being dead,” said Melody. “I can’t stand it. Everyone cries here.”

“They should have told us what it was like,” said Happy. “They should have warned us. They should have told us about the Houses of Pain.”

“You’ll be with us soon,” said Melody. “You won’t like it.”

“They keep a special place here, for people like you,” said Happy. “For those who betray their friends.”

“You’re not Happy and you’re not Melody and you’re not real!” yelled JC. He tore at the webbing with desperate hands, forcing a way through, leaving the figures and their cocoons behind. They stopped talking, but JC could still hear them crying. He fought his way through the webs to the end of the corridor, then it all went suddenly quiet. JC didn’t look back to see if the webbing and the cocoons had disappeared.

Kim moved on, and JC went after her.

Maybe it ran out of corridors, or maybe it ran out of tricks, but eventually JC followed Kim through a particularly low-arched entranceway and found himself on an unfamiliar platform. He stopped to get his breath and looked around, wondering why he felt so strongly and obscurely disturbed. He didn’t recognise anything. Not only had he never been on this platform, he wasn’t sure anyone had. Everything looked different, felt different . . . subtly
alien
, as though he’d stepped out of the world he knew and into some new and very dangerous place. It was a Tube station platform, but more like Oxford Circus seen through a distorting mirror. The overhead lights flickered, plunging this part of the platform and that into patches of impenetrable gloom. The station’s name wasn’t Oxford Circus. Instead, daubed on the far wall in old dried blood, was a single phrase.

 

ET IN INFERNO EGO.

 

 

There was no destination map, and the posters on the wall beside him made no sense at all. The landscapes and views were alien and unsettling and utterly inhuman. Houses made out of porcelain, horribly fragile and sickeningly gaudy. Hanging gardens tumbled down the sides of ruined office buildings, with long grey fronds twitching hungrily. Seas and skies of unknown colours, and the shadows of things passing by. The scenes seemed to shift and stir, sluggishly, as though the posters were dreaming.

Kim floated in mid air at the very end of the platform, rising and falling slowly, her feet dangling helplessly above the platform, her great mane of red hair streaming away from her as though she were underwater. Her eyes were fixed only on JC, and she was still trying to smile for him. He started slowly, cautiously, down the platform, and she stayed where she was, waiting for him. He stopped before her, still careful to maintain a respectful distance, and again they talked. In quiet, low, confidential voices.