“Yeah, more or less,” said Tommy Atkins. “I was hoping I’d get a chance to bayonet it. .”
He was the one they recognised, from outside the door. All the others had disappeared, gone in a moment. He leaned over the display case, wrinkling his nose at what remained of the blob. “You, behave yourself! Don’t make me have to come down here again. Or there will be trouble.”
He straightened up, nodded easily to the Empty Librarian; and disappeared.
Melody and Happy realised they were still holding each other. They quickly let go, stepped back; and then looked at each other. JC went for a little walk, to calm himself down. He was used to being the one who saved the day at the last moment; and he didn’t like being upstaged. And he was pretty certain his plan to use the Objects of Power would have worked, in a generally destructive kind of way. .
The Empty Librarian looked thoughtfully at the ghost girl Kim.
“You’re not the first restless spirit we’ve had down here, my dear; not by a long shot. Some field agents have difficulty letting go. . The filters keep most of them out, but you’re something different, aren’t you? I can see the mark of Strangeness on you, like your Mr. Chance. And your two other friends, of course.”
“Don’t tell them,” said Kim. “They don’t know. They don’t need to know, yet. It would only upset them.”
“As you wish, miss,” said the Empty Librarian. “Now, is there any way in which I can be of service to you?”
“Is there anything here especially suited to my. . special nature?”
“There are the Ghostly Reads, miss. The last aetheric remains, of books that no long exist on the material plane. Ghosts of lost books; perfect reading material for the not yet departed.”
“Show me,” said Kim.
But when the Empty Librarian led her to a collection of glowing, semi-transparent books on a dusty shelf, flickering like dying light bulbs, Kim found that although she could take the books off the shelf, and even open them and read them, they were all of them written in dead languages she couldn’t understand.
She went back to join the others and found JC glowering at the Empty Librarian.
“These are the Carnacki Institute Secret Libraries! One of the biggest repositories of hidden knowledge in the world! There must be something here that can help us!”
“JC. .” said Kim.
“No! I need to know this. I need to know why Outer forces brought me back from the dead!”
“Ah, sir,” said the Empty Librarian, not unkindly. “You don’t need books for that. You don’t need anything we have here. We deal only in the Past; and you are concerned with the Future. You need to get back out in the field, sir, take names, and kick bottoms, and get your answers direct from the horse’s mouth, as it were. You need to go to the source, sir.”
* * *
JC and his team sat quietly in the car, in someone else’s private parking place. Thinking, considering, what to do next. The sun was finally up, shedding a cold grey light across the Woolwich Arsenal. A few birds had started singing, in a half-hearted sort of way. People in uniforms came and went, but went nowhere near the car. Word had got around.
JC turned suddenly, to look at Melody in the back seat. “Did you bring your lap-top with you?”
“Of course,” she said. “It’s in my back-pack.”
“Get it up and running,” said JC. “Can you get a signal here?”
“This lap-top could get a signal anywhere,” said Melody. “It’s very well trained.” She soon had it open on her lap. “All right, I’m signed in. What am I looking for?”
“Catherine Latimer,” said JC. “Dear old Boss of Bosses. Her fingerprints were all over what just happened. See if there’s anything new about her in the Carnacki files. See what people are saying about her.”
“No problem,” said Melody, her fingers flying across the keyboard.
“What’s going on?” said Happy.
“Damned if I know,” said JC. “But I’m starting to get a really bad feeling. .”
“Welcome to my world,” said Happy. “We have T-shirts and decoder rings and everything. And you don’t even want to know what the and everything involves.”
“Mouth is open, should be shut,” said JC.
“Yes, boss.”
It took a while, with Melody frowning more and more severely as she jumped from site to site, looking at things she definitely wasn’t cleared to know, but finally she let out a long breath and looked at JC.
“If the Carnacki Institute was a business,” said Melody, “I would say I was looking at a hostile takeover. Someone is trying to remove Catherine Latimer from her position as Head of the Institute, and replace her with someone else. Loyal to. . someone else.”
“Is that necessarily a bad thing?” said Happy. “Would be nice to have a Boss who didn’t make me want to wet myself every time she looks at me.”
“She may be an ogre,” said JC, “but she’s our ogre. And better the ogre you know. . Who’s plotting against her, Melody?”
“I can’t tell,” said Melody, scowling. “Whoever it is is hiding their tracks with great thoroughness, behind walls and walls of secrecy. There are lots of people involved in this, with a hell of a lot of the left hand not knowing what the right foot’s doing. . but this is all very definitely being organised by someone already deep within the Carnacki Institute. And, fairly high up. . Someone is quite definitely informing against Catherine Latimer, easing the path for whoever’s trying to oust her.”
And that was when Catherine Latimer’s grim face suddenly appeared on the lap-top screen, glaring out at them all. Melody made a loud squeak of surprise, then tried very hard to look as though she hadn’t.
“What the hell are you people doing, looking at things that are none of your business?” the Boss said loudly. “And what were you doing back at Chimera House? I didn’t authorise any return visit! Come and see me in my private office. And yes, that does include the ghost. Welcome back, Kim. It’s about time. Be in my office at 9:00 A.M. sharp! All of you! Or there will be trouble.”
Her face disappeared from the lap-top screen, and Melody quickly slammed the lid shut.
“Well,” said JC. “This should be interesting.”
“Have I got time to change my trousers?” said Happy.
THREE
Some days, it’s all hurry up and wait, JC decided. He and Happy and Melody sat together in the Boss’s outer office, on the uncomfortable visitors’ chairs provided. Deliberately designed that way, to keep visitors from feeling too important, or even welcome. It was twenty past nine in the morning, and the Boss still wasn’t ready to meet them. The three of them had of course arrived at 9:00 A.M. on the dot because it was more than their lives were worth to keep Catherine Latimer waiting one moment if she wanted to see them. . But the Boss did like to keep people waiting, to remind them she was the Boss.
The Waiting Room was small, stuffy, and entirely windowless, tucked away in the back of Buckingham Palace. In a part of the building that didn’t officially exist. Dozens of portraits covered all four walls, without even the smallest space left for a clock or a calendar. All head-and-shoulder shots, of Carnacki Institute agents who had fallen in the field and never got up again-the Honoured Dead. The faces all looked worryingly young because few field agents ever survived long enough to reach retirement. Or even middle age. It wasn’t a job you did for the honour or the glory, and definitely not for the money; you did it because you believed it was a job worth doing. The job was its own reward because you certainly weren’t going to get any other kind.
The oldest portraits were oil paintings, moving steadily on through daguerreotypes to sepia prints, and all the way up to the latest digital photos. You posed for your official portrait the day you were accepted into the fold because you might not get another chance. The only thing all the portraits had in common was that none of the faces were smiling. They were all the same size, the same frame, with no names and no histories. Not even a Lest We Forget. The Carnacki Institute didn’t encourage sentimentality. Perhaps because everyone involved knew that tragedy came as standard.