“Shut up!” said Erik. “Shut up! Get out of my head!”
“Wouldn’t go in there on a bet,” said Kim. “It’s not my fault you wear your sins so openly.”
“They weren’t all failures! I achieved things, important things! I did!” Erik was breathing hard, almost on the edge of tears. “Don’t think I can’t hurt you because you’re dead!”
His left hand dived inside his coat, but JC was immediately there, putting himself between Kim and Erik.
“Don’t even think about it,” said JC.
Erik swallowed hard and looked away, unable to meet JC’s gaze, even muffled behind sunglasses. He nodded quickly to JC, and to Kim, then hurried away to hide behind Natasha, who ignored him.
“If you’ve all finished butting your heads together, perhaps we could concentrate on the extremely imminent end of the bloody world!” said Melody. “We are running out of time, people. Quite possibly literally.”
“Sorry,” said JC.
He moved over to join Melody at her instruments and made a show of studying the displays thoughtfully, as though they meant something to him. If Melody wasn’t entirely fooled, she was kind enough to keep it to herself.
“Any clues as to who or what our Intruder might be?” said JC, after a while.
“Nothing definitive,” said Melody. “But it’s not just . . . something from the afterworlds. This is Big, really quite unbelievably Big. One of the Great Beasts, perhaps. The Hogge, or the Serpent . . . Bad news on every level you can think of. If I really understood what these displays are telling me, I think I’d be very upset.”
“One of the Great Beasts?” said Happy, incredulously. “That is way out of our league!”
“Speak for yourself,” Natasha said immediately.
“You’re not fooling anyone,” Happy said viciously. “I can feel your fear from here.”
“You feel me again without my permission, and I’ll slap your face off,” said Natasha.
“Children, children . . .” JC murmured. “Play nice, or there will be spankings. Melody, could the presence of the Intruder in our world explain why I was touched by the Light? Was I granted this new strength to . . . even things out? Give us a fighting chance?”
“Who knows why the gods do anything?” said Erik.
“They are not gods!” Happy said immediately. “Don’t use that word. Never use that word. Just because they’re so much more than us, it doesn’t mean they’re gods.”
“What difference does it make?” said Kim, puzzled.
“Because you can’t fight gods,” said Happy.
“We can fight things that think they’re gods,” JC said cheerfully. “Remember that being we encountered in the supermarket car park? Worshipped by generations of early Humanity; and we still kicked its arse and sent it home crying. Melody, could our Intruder be anything like that?”
“No. That was a much more basic, even elemental, force. Not coherent enough even to have a name or identity. We’re faced with something far more sophisticated. A single entity, or presence, that can change our world simply by existing in it.” She looked at Happy. “Spell the word god with a lower case, and it’s a good enough term for what’s down here in the darkness with us.”
Everyone looked at each other. No-one wanted to be the first to say anything.
“We are not equipped to deal with a Great Beast,” Happy said finally. “Let’s be real here, people. Outer Forces like that are so far out of our league we couldn’t even see the league from where we are. We’re ghost finders, not god killers.”
“What we need are better weapons,” said Natasha.
“Bigger weapons. First rule of the Crowley Project: there’s nothing in supernature that can’t be taken down with a big enough stick. Maybe if we combined our resources . . .”
“You’re seriously contemplating throwing down with a god?” said Melody.
“We’ve been known to kill gods, at the Project,” said Erik airily. “Sometimes we eat them, too.”
“You couldn’t even stand up to me,” said Kim. “And I’m only dead.”
“Confidence is fun,” said JC. “Sanity is better. We need a plan.”
“We need weapons!” said Natasha.
“You can’t fight the Great Beasts!” said Happy. “They’re as much conceptual as anything, a horrible Idea from a higher plane, downloaded into physical form in our dimension. You can’t kill an Idea. The best we can hope for is to pry it loose from our plane and send it home with a flea in its ear.” He frowned, considering. “And we might be able to do that. So far, all the signs suggest our Intruder is following the standard pattern of any haunting, building everything from and around a single focal point.”
“You’re talking about me,” said Kim.
“We don’t know that for sure,” said JC.
Happy ignored him, looking at Melody. “How far away from us is the Intruder, and please say lots.”
“Hard to tell,” said Melody. “If I’m interpreting these readings correctly, and I’d be the first to admit that there’s a whole lot of guesswork involved . . . it seems our Intruder has added a whole new platform to this station. A half-way place, where its world butts up against ours. This new platform comes and goes, not always there, or at least, not always connected to our reality. It’s the Beast’s lair. Home for its new physical form. For whatever shape it’s taken in our world. We can only access this new station with the Intruder’s permission.”
“Is it there now?” said JC.
“Oh yes,” said Melody. “It’s driving my long-range sensors crazy. They don’t like the taste of it at all.”
Kim looked round suddenly. “JC, something’s coming.”
Everyone turned to look at her. JC moved over to stand beside her, but her gaze was elsewhere.
“Are you sure?” said Melody. “There’s nothing on the monitors.”
“Something’s coming,” said Kim, in a dreamy voice. “Something bad.”
JC studied Kim, who was floating in mid air with her head cocked slightly on one side, as though listening to something only she could hear.
“What is it, Kim? What’s coming for us? Where is it coming from?”
Her left hand rose slowly to point at the far tunnel-mouth. Everyone looked into the darkness, but there was no roar of an approaching train, no pressure wave of disturbed air. Even the rail tracks were free of any vibration. Natasha and Erik stood close together. JC and Happy stared silently at the tunnel-mouth, considering their options. And Melody stood protectively between her machines and whatever was coming, her machine-pistol at the ready. Happy surreptitiously dry swallowed a couple of pills. He took a deep breath, and sweat popped out across his face. His heart was beating dangerously fast.
A Tube train emerged from the tunnel-mouth, moving smoothly and silently, an ordinary train, with ordinary empty cars. Except the engine made no sound at all, and the brightly lit cars didn’t rock or clatter in the slightest. The train pulled slowly, steadily, into the station, with barely a breath of disturbed air, and came easily to a halt. The five agents braced themselves, ready for any kind of attack; but nothing happened. After a while, one set of car doors slid silently open and waited, invitingly. No-one moved. None of them liked the look of this train. There was nothing obviously unnatural about it, apart from its quiet, but if anything, it was too ordinary, too perfect, as though it was newly made, never used before.
“All right,” said JC. “This is an invitation. The Intruder sent this train to bring us to it. No more games, no more attacks . . . But why? Because we’ve proved we can handle anything it can throw at us? Because we’ve proved ourselves worthy? Or because it’s so much stronger on its home ground . . . Could it be that it’s afraid there’s something we could do, to drive it from our plane, if it doesn’t deal with us first? Is it because the Light reached down and touched me, or because we have Kim now?”