“Why us?” said Happy, plaintively. “Why is it always us?”
“They might want us dead,” said Melody. “Have you considered that?”
“If they’d wanted you dead, you’d be dead by now,” said Kim. Everyone looked at her. She shrugged. “That’s what I’m feeling.”
“Anything else you’d like to share?” snapped Happy.
Melody leaned in close to him. “Don’t upset the dead girl,” she murmured. “You really want a ghost mad at you?”
Kim surprised them all by seriously considering Happy’s question, her eyes far away. “Someone is hiding from us. Close by.”
They all looked quickly around, but the long laboratory stretched away before them, open and still and quiet and completely empty.
“Is that it?” said JC.
“For now, yes,” said Kim. “I’m not like Happy. I don’t see or hear things like he does. I just get feelings.”
“I feel things,” protested Happy.
“Of course you do,” said Melody. “In your own special way.”
“Meanwhile, back at the theorising,” JC said determinedly. “Someone was running those ghost shells, down in the lobby. Could that have been the New People? And if so, were they responsible for their deaths?”
“Seems like they killed all the scientists and doctors, and even some of their own,” said Melody. “What’s a few policemen and security men, after that?”
“Hold everything,” said Happy. “Kim’s right-someone else is here with us.”
They all looked round again. Still nothing. The open planning and the bright fluorescent light left nowhere to hide.
“They’re here,” Happy insisted, his eyes wide and scared. “Lots of them. Getting closer all the while. And they don’t feel at all friendly.”
JC looked at Kim, and she nodded quickly. “They’re coming from a direction I don’t understand. From… outside reality.”
“Human?” said JC.
“I don’t think so,” said Happy.
“Not any more,” said Kim. “They feel… awful. Like something human turned inside out, so all the bad things show. JC, I’m scared.”
“Dead people, come back as something other than people,” said Happy, frowning suddenly. He might have been talking to himself. “Some ghosts are stronger than others. Some are only images, trapped in a repeating moment of Time like insects in amber. Some are recordings, stone tapes playing back. Some are what remains after death. Things that won’t stay dead, or all the way dead, because they’re driven by some overwhelming purpose. And some ghosts are predators… leeching energy from the living to maintain their half-life existence in the waking world.
“It’s getting cold, just like in the lobby. Something is sucking all the life energy out of this place, so the ghosts can bleed in from whatever bolt-hole they’ve found to manifest here, with the living.”
“Who is it, Happy?” JC said quietly. “Who is it that’s coming?”
“The Doctors,” said Happy. “Slaughtered and butchered here by their own creations, driven insane just by being here when it happened.”
“Are you saying that simply being around these New People is enough to drive humans crazy?” said Melody.
“They’re too much for us,” said Happy, dreamily. “We can’t cope. Witnessing the change was enough to blow all the Doctors’ fuses. That’s what we’ve got here-the flotsam and jetsam of a radical experiment, the fall-out and debris from the creation of a new thing. Mad Doctor ghosts, riding the coat-tails of the New People, soaking up the energies released to maintain their insane existence after death.”
“Happy?” said JC. “Happy, can you hear me? You’ve gone too far; you need to come back to us.”
“I see you,” said Happy, staring down the long laboratory at something only he could see. “I see you…”
Melody stepped in front of him, blocking his view. She raised both hands to cup his face tenderly, meeting his gaze with her own.
“Come back to us, Happy. Come back to me. Don’t leave me here alone, in the light.”
His eyes snapped back into focus, and he smiled at her. “I never knew your voice could reach so far. All right, I’m back. I don’t like it, but I’m back. What’s happening, and is it too late to head for the exit?”
“The Doctor… is in,” said a voice, seeming to float down the long, open floor towards them. A foul, desiccated voice, dripping with ill will.
The whole floor was changing. The very structure and constituents of the long laboratory became warped and twisted, wrenched out of shape by unnatural forces. Advance harbingers of the Mad Doctor ghosts, altering the world into something more to their liking, something more able to support their awful existence. Making the world over into a reflection of their own insane needs and wishes. Solid surfaces slumped, flowing and re-forming. Metal ran away in lumpy streams, like melting wax, while scientific equipment heaved and turned, taking on new shapes and meanings. The walls bowed slowly inwards, and the ceiling drooped. The light intensified, becoming painfully bright-perhaps because the Mad Doctors wanted what was happening to be clearly seen, and appreciated. Or perhaps to make the hunting easier.
The computer Melody had been working on swelled up suddenly. The monitor screen burst stickily and vomited its contents onto the floor. The pool spread, as bits of silicon and steel grew legs and scuttled across the floor like maddened insects. All across the laboratory, machines unfolded like blossoming flowers, becoming strange enigmatic things with too many angles. The glass windows all along the far wall disappeared. Where they should have been was nothing -an absence in the world, something the eye couldn’t even acknowledge.
“Scalpel, scalpel, shining bright, in the horror of the night,” said the voice. “What unnatural hand and eye can undo thy yielding flesh?”
“I am getting serious operating-theatre vibes,” said Happy. “And not in a good way.”
“Look,” said Melody, pointing down the long floor. “The Mad Doctors are here.”
They came scuttling and crawling, around and over and in between the warped and twisted structures that now filled the laboratory. They moved in sudden darts, like white-coated spiders, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on more. Mad Doctors in pristine white gowns and blood-spattered surgical masks, ghostly hands clutching scalpels and bone-saws and sharp steel probes. Their eyes were cool and vicious and full of a terrible, hot insanity. They had left their humanity behind them when they died and become something else, with new thoughts in their twisted minds, and dark foul emotions.
There was no way of telling how many Mad Doctor ghosts there were. They were here and there and everywhere, blinking in and out, never still.
“We can see what’s wrong with you,” said the voice. It didn’t seem to come from any one ghost in particular. “We can see what’s bad in you. We’re going to cut it out and play with it, and make it ours. And oh what fun we’ll have-while you last.”
“Happy,” JC said quietly. “Are they really there? I mean- physically there?”
“Oh yes,” said Happy. “Very, very definitely solid and real… These are powerful manifestations, JC. Dead, but not departed. I think
… they exist in the spaces between spaces, in the odd little gaps and lacunae of reality, hiding like trap-door spiders. Think of them as a by-product of the process that made the New People. Or think of them as aetheric parasites. Remaking the laboratory was them putting on something more comfortable. They want to terrify us. I think they feed on fear.”
“They’re still ghosts,” said JC. “And we deal with ghosts.”
“They’re predators,” said Kim, her nose wrinkled with disgust. “And they’re hungry. I can see them more clearly than you can. They’re not human any more. I don’t have words for what they’ve made themselves into, for what they really are. They’re insane, JC, and their madness is contagious. It’s affecting the world.”
“Can we destroy them?” said JC.
“They’re dead,” said Kim. “But not all the way. You might say.. . they’re clinging on to existence by their fingernails. Their madness lets them do impossible things, but that very madness is what makes their grip on reality so precarious. Pry them loose, JC.”