He stepped back into the dressing-room. Benjamin and Elizabeth, backed up in the far corner, looked at him pitifully. Elizabeth was trying to be brave; and Benjamin was standing in front of her, shielding her. Happy smiled and nodded quickly to them, and they almost collapsed in relief.
“Whatever that was, it isn’t there any more,” said Happy. “But it’s getting closer. And stronger. If I’m going to protect you, you have to tell me the truth about what really happened here, twenty years ago.”
“I’d rather die,” said Elizabeth.
Happy nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. It could come to that.”
SIX
LOBBY DISPLAY
Back in the lobby, Melody happily bustled around her precious machines, firing up her scientific equipment, checking that everything was as it should be, and having a merry old time. She always enjoyed putting things in order, making sure they were working right, crossing off things on her list and running through her rituals. She liked machines as opposed to people because, with machines, you only had to punch the instructions in once. Melody understood machines. Whereas people, usually men, remained mostly a mystery. Melody had never had any problems having sex with men; it was the talking to them afterwards that gave her problems. One of the reasons she enjoyed Happy so much was that he was delightfully uncomplicated. He divided the entire world into things that he liked and things that scared him; and as long as Melody was careful as to which category she put herself into, she always knew where she was with Happy.
She patched in the short-range sensors, fed extra power to the long-range sensors, and smiled happily as the readouts flickered calmly before her. This was the part of any Ghost Finders mission that she enjoyed the most, being left alone to set up and calibrate her marvellous machines, without the others hanging around making what they presumably thought were helpful comments. She didn’t feel alone, or vulnerable, in the lobby because she was never alone when she was with her equipment. Her machines made her feel safe and protected because she knew she could always rely on them. Machines rarely let her down, and on the rare occasions when they did, she either fixed them or hit them until they didn’t. People, on the other hand, were always surprising her, and rarely in a good way.
She thought of JC, off on his own somewhere with the lovely Lissa, and smiled briefly. JC might think he was impressing Lissa, but Melody was fairly confident Lissa wasn’t the kind who impressed easily. Melody knew a fellow hard-hearted professional when she saw one. In fact, JC would do well to watch out for himself.
Melody’s thoughts then turned to Happy, off on his own with the two actors; and she didn’t smile at all. She wasn’t at all sure why JC had put Happy together with the oh-so-theatrical Benjamin and Elizabeth. Happy did have some good qualities if you were prepared to dig deep enough to find them; but leadership and responsibility definitely weren’t on the list. It was always possible JC thought the actors might relax a little around Happy and unburden their souls to him where they probably wouldn’t talk to JC, or to her. People often felt sorry for Happy and told him all manner of things they’d never tell another soul, so he’d stop looking at them with those big, soulful, puppyish eyes. Personally…Melody doubted it. Benjamin and Elizabeth had secrets they only shared with each other. Anyone could see that.
She wasn’t worried about Happy. Wasn’t worried at all. The actors would look after him.
She moved back and forth before her control boards, swaying sensuously, checking sensor displays and energy readouts, fine-tuning things here and there and having a perfectly wonderful time. Everything in the lobby seemed entirely normal, all conditions as expected. Not even a hint of a cold spot, or an energy spike; no electromagnetic fluctuations; and not even a murmur on the EVP dead-radio channels. Melody looked cheerfully round the lobby…and then something caught her eye. There were posters on the lobby walls. Large, colourful posters, leftovers from the theatre’s past triumphs. There were half a dozen of them, scattered around the lobby, and Melody had to turn around in a complete circle to take them all in, in turn. Melody’s good temper was gone in a moment, her smile replaced by a slowly deepening scowl. Because she couldn’t for the life of her remember whether the posters had been there before. She hadn’t noticed them when she first entered the lobby, or when she was putting her instruments together; but then she often didn’t notice unimportant details like that. Unless someone pointed them out to her or she had nothing else to look at.
Melody came out from behind her carefully arranged semi-circle of equipment and walked right up to the poster in front of her to take a closer look. The poster was a good five feet tall and maybe two or three feet wide, a clear, firm image on good-quality paper, with colours so bright and shiny they bordered on gaudy. The image before her was a portrait of a handsome young woman in a full-length wedding gown of a spotless white so dazzling it was almost painful to the eye. The bride had thrown her filmy veil back over her long jet-black hair, to reveal a grinning, sparkling-eyed face. She was hurrying down a long, curving staircase, perhaps half-way down…looking out at the viewer. Melody frowned. It was a pleasant enough image; but what was it for? Was it on display to promote a play, or a character, or some forthcoming production? There were no words anywhere on the portrait, not even a title—nothing to indicate its purpose.
Melody moved on to the next poster, on her left. Just as big and as colourful, this second picture showed an old-fashioned, even traditional image, of a clipper sailing-ship, far out at sea, dashing through the waves with sails full of wind and a proud prow raised high into the air. There was no name anywhere on the ship. Uniformed sailors were captured in traditional poses and occupations, all over the ship. Several were set high up in the rigging, pointing out ahead, at something only they could see. Dark blue waves rose out of the ocean, bonneted with foam, and overhead the sky was a clear and empty blue under a perfect summer sun. Again, there was no lettering or information anywhere on the poster. It seemed to Melody that you might expect to see a painting like this on some office wall but not in a lobby. So why was it here? Strange…
She moved on, around the exterior of the lobby, vaguely aware she was drifting always to the left, anti-clockwise; widdershins. Anywhen else, anywhere else, that thought might have worried her. But here she only had eyes and thoughts for the fascinating posters.
The next portrait was of a quartet of fine young fellows, dressed in the formal clothing of the early twentieth century. They stood companionably together, filling the whole portrait, toasting the viewers with brimming glasses of red wine. All four young men looked very smart and very handsome, young gentlemen out on the town, perhaps, smiling winningly at the viewer. Melody decided…that she didn’t care for them. She deliberately turned away from them and moved on.
The fourth portrait showed a pleasant young woman in a fashionable evening gown, complete with long evening gloves, all in the same faintly disturbing shade of buttercup yellow. The young woman stood beside a half-open door, pulling it back to receive someone. She looked very smart, almost aristocratic, and very pretty, with bobbed blonde hair, innocent blue eyes, and a flashing smile. Whoever she was greeting, she was clearly very pleased to see them. So why did Melody think the woman in the portrait looked scared?
The next portrait was a winter-time country scene. A long, narrow lane sweeping between two fields piled high with a fresh covering of snow. There were no other details. No trees, no stone walls to mark the fields’ boundaries, no animals or animal tracks to be seen anywhere on the fields. No snow in the narrow lane; only a beaten earthen track. And up above, a grey and lowering sky with a threat of thunder and maybe an approaching storm. Melody leaned in close. She could almost feel the bitter cold of that winter day on her face. And there, off in the distance, right at the far end of the narrow lane, a small, dark figure, trudging down the lane, toward the viewer. So far off he was little more than a dark shape. There was a sense of…anticipation about the scene. As though if you watched it long enough, something might happen. Melody slowly turned her head away and moved on.