Ghost of a Chance (9 page)

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.

JC reached out to touch the poster, then pulled his hand back again. He had a sudden horrible intuition that it might plunge on into the poster, as though into a deep pool. He made himself walk on, as outwardly casual and unconcerned as ever. The next poster shouted the wares for some new overblown sci-fi epic. As JC watched, the improbable starships, with their blazing energy beams stabbing across the starry night, faded slowly away, revealing instead a stark and brutal poster entitled:
What You Should Do in the Case of Sonic Attack
. It made scary reading. At the top was a date: 35 October, 2118.

JC kept walking, increasing his pace slightly, glancing at the posters he passed. Scenes seemed to slip and slide, slyly re-creating themselves. Disturbing images clung to the wall, becoming strange windows into unsettling alien worlds and strange dimensions, all of them accompanied by unfamiliar text—the kind of writing you see in dreams, rich and meaningful, packed with a terrible significance and urgent warnings you can’t quite seem to grasp. JC walked faster and faster, wanting to see as much as possible while he could. He was fascinated. What would have unnerved and disturbed lesser men was meat and drink to him.

And yet, at the same time, a small but very real voice insisted on being heard, informing him that the only reason he was so immersed in his work . . . was because he had nothing else in his life he cared about. He never allowed himself to think that out loud. Not even when he lay awake in his single bed, in the early hours of the morning when the dawn seems furthest away . . . when a man’s thoughts turn almost against his will to what he’s made of his life as opposed to what he meant to make of it. When he looks back at his past, and sees nothing to value, or into his future . . . and sees nothing but more of the same. JC had always been a loner, even before the Carnacki Institute found him; and if his work was all he had, it was more than most people had.

He could never have a love in his life, only lovers. Ships that passed in the night and never called afterwards. Because JC could never even hint at what he really did for a living without scaring the other party away. So most of the women who passed through JC’s life said little, kept themselves to themselves, and left no trace behind. There hadn’t been anyone for months . . . but JC couldn’t seem to bring himself to care, much. You can still be lonely even when there’s someone else in the room if she’s not the right kind of someone.

He couldn’t connect with any of the Institute’s female field agents. They were too competitive, or too traumatised, or too haunted . . . there was always something. So JC lived alone and told himself he preferred it that way. He kept himself as busy as possible, so he wouldn’t have to tell himself that too often.

He did love his work. It was fascinating. Always something new.

Genuinely intrigued and delighted, he watched the posters change. His work never let him down.

Further away from JC than simple distance could account for, Happy went bouncing through empty white-tiled corridors, peering this way and that with wide, wondering eyes. He’d dosed himself with a wide variety of pills, and he was really rocking and rolling by then. There was a spring in his step and iron in his spine, and his thoughts were racing at a thousand miles a second. His experienced brain could handle a dozen conflicting chemistries at once and still know which way was up. Happy was grinning fiercely, his eyes barely blinking at all, and he was waiting for something nasty to show itself, so he could leap on it with loud cries and wrestle it to the ground before giving it a good kicking.

A properly medicated Happy could walk up to a banshee and ask if it knew any show tunes.

His psychic shields were still firmly in place, not even touched by the various chemicals fighting it out for supremacy in his battered grey cells. Happy took drugs to give him an edge, not to hide behind. Or at least, that was what he told himself.

He stopped at an intersection and spun round and round on his toes, his head up as though testing the air, listening for sounds only he could hear. He’d been nagged for some time by a constant feeling there was someone behind him; but no matter how quickly he turned around, there was never anyone there. Happy reined in his raging thoughts with an iron will unsuspected by the rest of his team and stood very still. There was definitely someone, or something, down in the corridors with him. He didn’t need his telepathy to tell him that. He sniffed loudly, giggled briefly, and rubbed his dry hands together. It was times like this he wished he carried a really big gun. Or even a really big stick. With nails in it.

Many people asked, and not a few demanded to know, why Happy needed to take so many pills. A few, with some experience of telepathy, said they understood; but they didn’t, really. Happy only ever took what he needed to make himself brave, smart, or strong enough to be able to do his job properly, so he could strike back at those aspects of the world that had made his life such a misery from an early age.

Revenge is always the best comfort.

At home he ate, slept, and watched television, just like anybody else. Drugged himself with the routine and the ordinary and the everyday. He couldn’t afford to be doped up all the time. Couldn’t afford to bliss out and dream his life away. Because Happy knew what else lived in the world alongside the rest of us. He needed to be prepared. Because you never knew when something might be sneaking up on you from behind.

No friends, no lovers, no love. Because he could never share his world with anyone. It wouldn’t be fair.

Happy looked around, and the corridors stretched away in every direction, impossibly long, openly threatening. Happy laughed out loud and clapped his hands together, the sound almost shockingly loud in the quiet.

“You can’t get me!” said Happy, in a loud breathy voice. “You can’t even touch me because I’m not really here. I’m armoured up, and ninety degrees from reality, far beyond your reach. So come on out and give me your best shot; and I’ll laugh right in your face. How do you like them apples, Casper?”

The corridors lay open and silent before him, but Happy knew someone was listening. Checking him out, from a distance. Happy wondered what it made of him and his altered state of consciousness. Maybe it was scared of him. That would be fun. Ghosts were quite simple things, really; if they couldn’t scare you, they were usually lost for an alternative. So Happy set off down the nearest corridor, full of chemical good cheer and hardly shaking at all, medicinally armed against anything the unknown could throw at him.

Happy liked to think of himself as the last of the Untouchables.

Back on the southbound platform, Melody struggled with her precious equipment, trying through expert intimidation and sheer force of personality to make the damned things do what they were supposed to. She bent over the computer keyboards, staring right into the monitor screens, coaxing and cursing them in the same half-conscious murmur. Melody dealt in hard facts and felt helpless and vulnerable without them. She’d approached the Carnacki Institute in the first place because all her researches had convinced her that only the Institute could provide her with answers to questions no-one else would even discuss. She’d hoped for a nice quiet life in some nice quiet Institute Library; instead, they made her a field agent and sent her out into the world to find her own answers. Typically, her experiences in the field had only provided her with a whole new set of questions.

Still, her position did give her access to cutting-edge, state-of-the-art technology, and that made up for a lot. The instruments ranged before her could break down and analyse events and energies that most scientists wouldn’t even admit existed. Of course, that wasn’t enough for Melody Chambers. She didn’t only want to know what existed in the hidden corners of the world; she wanted, needed, to understand how they worked and why. Melody hated a mystery.

Some nights, lying on her back in the dark with an exhausted lover slumbering beside her, Melody dreamed of a special Nobel Prize, just for her, awarded for her unprecedented advances in the field of the so-called supernatural. The first woman to make the unseen world make sense.

She worked furiously, her fierce gaze tracking impatiently from one screen to another, following the flow of information with quick jerky movements of her head. Although she’d never admit it, she always hated this part of the mission, where the other two went off on their own to see what there was to see and left her behind, on her own, to see things second hand through her instruments. She didn’t like being left on her own. Like the girl who tags around after a boys’ gang, and always gets dumped at the first opportunity. She felt better when there was someone else around. Someone close at hand. They didn’t have to be right there with her; just . . . around. So she could call on them for . . . assistance, if she wanted to.

She felt the same way sometimes when she was alone in her little flat. No matter how many other people had been through it.

Happy and JC returned at the end of the agreed hour, making a certain amount of noise so Melody could be sure it was them coming and not get over-eager with her machine-pistol. None of them had anything specific to report, and the more closely Melody questioned the men about what they’d seen and encountered, the more vague their answers became. And when they questioned her, Melody was forced to admit that while her machines were providing her with more sensor readings than she could keep track of, she had nothing useful to contribute either.