The third witness was a child. Maybe eight or nine years old, in a pretty party dress. She laughed at the camera, but it was an adult’s laugh, not a child’s. And all she would say was Look who’s come to see you! over and over again.
The Boss turned off her screen and fixed the three field agents with a steady stare. “So far, we’ve studied three hundred and seventeen witness statements. Those were the most . . . representative. We’ve had to section many of them under the Mental Health Act, for everyone’s safety. Hopefully, we’ll be able to do something for them once this nasty business has been dealt with. For the moment, the official version is that the Underground has been the subject of a terrorist attack, involving a new nerve gas that induces nightmare hallucinations. That should keep the press out, for a while. Understand me; this has to be cleared up fast.”
“And that’s why you called us in,” JC said happily. “Because we’re the best you’ve got.”
“No,” said the Boss. “You’re just the best available. Everyone else is busy, or too far away to be called in quickly enough. So you get the case. Don’t drop the ball on this one, people, or I will have yours off with a blunt spoon. I want this dealt with, whatever it takes.”
“You always do,” said JC. “Do we get any backup?”
“No,” said the Boss. “Too risky. You’re on your own.”
“Oh joy,” said Happy.
“Deep joy,” said JC.
“Happy happy joy joy,” said Melody, unexpectedly.
“Get out,” said the Boss. “Shut this down hard, and fast, and all your many sins will be forgiven, if not forgotten. And try not to get yourselves killed. It’s expensive replacing good field agents.”
“Would this be a good time to talk about a raise?” said Happy.
THREE
GOING UNDERGROUND
In the old days, in the really old days, when people had to go in search of the dead, they went underground. They left the sunlight behind them and went down, all the way down, into the Underworld, there to parlay with gods and demons for the right to talk with the departed. Never an easy journey, and always a price to be paid, for a chance to talk to the dead. Gods come and go, civilisations rise and fall, belief systems prosper and fail; but still, even in this day and age, if you have business with the dead, you often have no choice but to go down, all the way down, into the dark places under the world.
JC Chance, Melody Chambers, and Happy Jack Palmer went down into the London Underground, into Oxford Circus Tube Station; and the police locked them in, then retreated swiftly to what they had been told were safe positions. The three ghost finders stood close together in the entrance lobby, instinctively drawing together for strength and comfort. The lobby was brightly lit and completely deserted. The ticket barriers were firmly closed, along with all the narrow enquiry windows; and nothing moved anywhere. The white-tiled walls, the brightly coloured posters, the sane and sensible lists of destinations . . . everything was as it should be. Except that nothing and nobody moved anywhere in all that sharp, merciless light.
Two men and a woman, standing on the set of a movie that hadn’t started filming yet. Waiting for someone, or something, to shout Action!
The first thing that struck JC was how complete the quiet was. Silence hung heavily on the air, reluctant to be broken or disturbed. It had no place in a busy station like this. It should be alive with sound, with the clatter and clamour of people rushing back and forth, and the distant thunder of trains coming and going, and the endless self-important announcements. But here, and now, there was nothing. Only the eerie quiet of an empty place, from which people had been driven, screaming.
Happy’s first reaction to Oxford Circus Station was to flinch sharply, as though he’d been hit. He barely stifled a groan of pain. For a telepath of his class, the station wasn’t empty at all. It was packed from wall to wall with faces and voices and any number of conflicting emotions, all the ingrained psychic traces of the millions of passengers who’d passed though the place, leaving a little of themselves behind, forever. Layer upon layer of them, falling away into the past, and beyond. Happy’s stomach muscles clenched, and sweat popped out all over his face. It was like everyone was shouting in his head at once, plucking viciously at his sleeve, jostling him from all sides. He blindly fished a bottle of pills out of an inner pocket; and then JC’s hand came sharply forward out of nowhere and clamped firmly, mercilessly, onto his wrist.
“No pills, Happy,” said JC, as kindly as he could. “I need you to be sharp, and focused.”
“I know, I know!” said Happy, jerking his wrist free. “I can handle it. I can.”
Reluctantly, he put the pills away, then scowled fiercely as he concentrated, painstakingly rebuilding and reinforcing the mental shields that let him live among Humanity without being overwhelmed by them. It wasn’t easy, and it got harder every year, perhaps because every year he grew a little more tired, at making sure the only voice inside his head was his. He was shaking and muttering and sweating profusely by the time he’d finished. He nodded curtly to JC, who nodded calmly back in return.
“Better now?” said JC.
“You have no idea,” said Happy, mopping roughly at his face with a surprisingly clean handkerchief. “One of these days, the strain of doing that will kill me, and maybe then I’ll get some rest.”
“We couldn’t do this without you,” said JC.
It was as close to an apology as Happy was going to get, and he knew it. He sniffed loudly and looked around him.
“Ugly place, this, in more ways than one. I mean, did they have a competition, and this colour scheme won? I’ve been locked up in cheerier institutions than this. And they had piped music.”
Happy grinned suddenly. “Anyone want to say It’s quiet, too quiet? I mean, it is traditional.”
JC laughed briefly and went striding around the empty lobby, looking closely at everything and running his hands over the silent ticket machines. He paced back and forth, on the trail of something only he could sense, his head up like a hound on the scent, sniffing for invisible clues. His eyes gleamed, and he grinned widely. JC was on the job and having the time of his life, as always.
Melody, meanwhile, ignored them both with the ease of long practice. She was only interested in the various pieces of high-tech equipment she’d brought with her, piled precariously high onto an unsteady trolley. She just knew the Institute technicians had damaged something when they loaded the trolley up; they always did. No-one understood or appreciated her precious machines like she did. She wouldn’t be happy until she’d set up base somewhere and could reassure herself that everything was working properly. She ran through her check-list again, making sure nothing had been left behind.
She paid no attention to what JC and Happy were doing. She trusted them to hold up their end. Inasmuch as she trusted anything that wasn’t a machine. You could fix machines when they went wrong . . . She dimly realised they’d stopped bickering, and she looked around, fists on her hips.
“Yes, fine,” she said. “Don’t do anything to help, will you? I can handle all this vitally important and extremely heavy equipment myself. Unaided.”
JC shot her an amused glance. “You know very well you don’t like us touching your toys, Melody. In fact, you have been known to stab at our hands with pointy things if you even think we’re going to touch something.”
“That’s because you always break them! You two could break an anvil merely by looking at it! You break more of my things than the things we go after. What I meant was, I need your help to get this trolley up and over the closed ticket barriers. Unless you have some clever trick to get us past them.”