“Pity,” said JC. “I could use a miracle-worker. I’m going to take a stroll further down the corridor, see what there is to see. Yell if you need anything, Melody.”
And he was off and gone, with Kim drifting after him. Happy slouched sullenly in the doorway.
“We shouldn’t be working this case,” he said flatly. “We’re supposed to deal with ghosties and ghoulies and things that go Boo! in the night. Whatever happened here has heavy science written all over it. We’re already out of our depth, even if JC won’t admit it, and way out of our comfort zone.”
“You speak for yourself,” said Melody, scowling thoughtfully at the monitor before her.
“I am!” said Happy. “Loudly and meaningfully, but no-one is listening! We shouldn’t be here! This isn’t what we do…”
Melody sighed loudly and turned round in her chair to look at him. “Those were ghosts, down in the lobby, weren’t they?”
“Well, yes, of a sort, but…”
“But nothing. You heard what the annoying man from the stretch limo said-find out what’s going on, and stop it. That’s the job. Everything else is just details.” She stopped and smiled at him almost fondly. “I know you don’t like to admit it, Happy, but it’s all science, all of the time. Ghosts, demons, the afterworlds-all of existence and everything beyond-it’s all science. We don’t always understand it yet, that’s all. Now hush like a good bunny and let me get on with my work, or I’ll start throwing words like quantum around, and you know how you hate that.”
Happy shuddered briefly in the doorway and shut up, and Melody went back to work.
Further down the corridor, JC was looking around what he had loudly declared he was naming Room Fourteen, picking things up, examining them, and putting them down again, trying to get a feel for the last person who’d lived there. Given the number of well-thumbed magazines, like Heat and OK, he was pretty sure the occupant had been female, but he didn’t say that out loud because he knew Kim would accuse him of being judgemental. There were no personal touches, no photos, no jewellery, not even any clothes. Were the test subjects supposed to go around all the time in those awful hospital gowns that only do up at the back? JC stood in the middle of the room, looking thoughtfully about him, but the room defeated him. It was deliberately bare and characterless, more like a waiting room than living quarters.
Kim threw herself onto the bed by the far wall to watch JC work, misjudged the distance, and fell half-way through the bed before she could stop herself. She quickly floated back up out of it, before JC could notice, and with precisely the right amount of concentration managed to float directly above the bed-sheets, so it looked like she was lying there. Kim wasn’t alive, but she liked to pretend she could still do everyday things, as though she were an ordinary girl. For JC’s sake, as well as her own.
“Anything?” she said brightly, when she was sure she could present the right image.
“Nothing useful,” said JC. “No trace of any upset or disturbance here. No signs of interrupted activity. Just like all the other rooms. It’s as though… everyone got up and left. Except, they couldn’t. Because all the doors were locked and bolted shut from the outside. So someone must have come and let them all out, and given them good reason to leave… Even though they must have been strictly instructed not to. Which implies they knew who the person who let them out was… someone in a position of authority.”
“Like the Marie Celeste,” said Kim, to show she was keeping up. “The old ship found floating out at sea with everyone missing and nothing to show where they had gone.”
“Yes,” said JC, smiling. “Something like that.” He looked over at Kim, and stopped smiling. “Kim, you’re sinking again.”
Her concentration had lapsed while they were talking, and she’d almost disappeared under the bed. She swore briefly and jumped up. She dropped to the floor and concentrated until her feet were as close to the carpet as she could manage without sinking through, then she walked carefully forward to stand before JC. She looked at him, almost defiantly.
“It’s not easy, you know, being dead. In fact, it’s really hard work. All those little things you take for granted, I have to fight for. I don’t sleep, eat, or rest. I can’t stand still, or sit, or lie down. Mostly, I just hover. There are strange aetheric winds that blow me this way and that, and odd impulses I don’t understand… You don’t know what it’s like! I do try to be normal for you…”
“I know,” said JC. “I know.” He smiled at her, careful not to appear upset in any way. There wasn’t anything useful he could say, so he settled for trying to lighten the moment. “Aren’t I worth it?”
“You’re the only thing that makes this bearable, JC,” said Kim, with painful earnestness. “If I didn’t have you, I think… I’d just let go.”
JC stood as close before her as he could, taking off his sunglasses so he could hold her eyes with his. She was the only one who could meet his unnatural gaze these days. “You know I’d never keep you here against your will. You do know that, right? If you ever feel it would be… easier for you to move on…”
“No,” Kim said immediately. “We found each other. After spending our lives alone, and thinking it would always be that way… Out of a whole world full of people, we found each other. How remarkable is that? I wish it could have happened while I was still alive. That I didn’t have to die to find love.”
“Me, too,” said JC. He put his arms around her, very carefully, not quite touching her. It was difficult because he couldn’t feel her, but he did his best. She put her arms around his waist, without quite touching him, and leaned her head almost on his shoulder, so their faces could be side by side. Hardly any space separated them, but it might as well have been forever. Their mouths were close, but they couldn’t even feel each other breathe. Because only JC was breathing. It was tense, and it was awkward, but it was the best they could do, so they stood that way for a while.
“Are you sure you can’t feel anything?” said Kim.
“Not even a ghostly chill,” said JC.
“Sooner or later,” said Kim, “you’re going to want someone who can touch you. A lover who can hold and comfort you.”
“I want you,” said JC. “You’re all I ever wanted, even when I didn’t know you existed. I love you, Kim.”
“And I love you,” said Kim. “Oh JC, it’s a cruel world, sometimes.”
“Hey,” said JC. “If it was a cruel world, we never would have found each other.”
“Yes,” said Kim. “There is that.”
“Isn’t there any upside to being a ghost?” said JC. “I mean, there are things you can do that I can’t.”
“Well,” said Kim, “sometimes, when you’re sleeping, and it’s a long time till morning… I go flying over London. I let go of gravity and fall upwards, into the night sky, and I go soaring over the rooftops. See the bright lights turn below me like a slow Catherine wheel, see the traffic roaring back and forth like so many toys. And sometimes I fly up among the stars and look down at the Earth, like the most precious and most fragile toy of all.”
“You see?” said JC. “I can’t do that.”
Back in Room Three, Melody had finally found something useful. Happy moved forward so he could peer over her shoulder and watched very secret files appear and disappear on the screen in response to Melody’s fingers flitting over the keyboard. It was all very scientific.
“All right,” said Happy, after a while. “You’ve got that smug and triumphant look on your face, so what am I missing? What have you found?”
“LD50,” said Melody, sitting back in her chair so suddenly she almost head-butted Happy in the face. She folded her arms and scowled at the screen. “And I don’t feel smug, or triumphant. This is not a good thing to have found. LD50 is the dosage at which the new drug is expected to kill half of the test group. Lethal Dose, Fifty per cent. Not something you should be finding in a drug being tested on volunteers. But this LD50 file is quite definitely attached to the Zarathustra project. It seems to be posing the question of what happens if the affected subjects can’t or won’t die? If they insisted on surviving, what should be a Lethal Dose?”