“Yes,” said JC. “It is.”
When they emerged into the main bar, Melody and Kim were waiting for them. JC filled them in on what had happened. The storm outside sounded worse than ever, loud and threatening, battering at the windows, like some furious creature trying to force its way in.
“So,” said Melody. “Lydia wasn’t responsible for everything that’s going on here.”
“No,” said Happy.
“Then removing Lydia didn’t remove the source of the problem,” said Kim.
“No,” said JC. “But some things. . just need doing.”
NINE
The main bar of the King’s Arms seemed reassuringly calm and normal after the extremes of the upper floor. Only the unrelenting din of the storm raging outside remained to remind them that the game wasn’t over yet. JC went behind the bar, found three unbroken glasses, and ceremoniously poured out the last of the good brandy. They all toasted each other solemnly while Kim looked on wistfully. Happy knocked his brandy back in one gulp, ignoring the disparaging looks from the other two, who knew how to treat a good brandy.
“This stuff is feeling more and more medicinal,” said Happy, slamming his glass back down on the bar and looking about him distractedly.
“You should know,” said Melody.
“Children, children,” murmured JC. “Do me a favour and slap each other round the head. I haven’t got the energy.”
“So what do we do now?” said Melody, deliberately averting her gaze from the bar’s windows, as they jumped and rattled in their frames. “I mean, we’ve dealt with all the obvious trouble, on the upper floor; but it doesn’t seem to have changed anything. Listen to that storm!”
“Not a fit night out for man or beast,” muttered Happy, looking glumly into his empty glass. “If it rains any harder, it’ll be ark-building time.”
And then his head came up suddenly, and he looked quickly about him.
“Hold everything and pass the ammunition. Something. . is heading our way. I can feel it.”
JC put down his glass and looked steadily at Happy. “What kind of Something are we talking about here, Happy? Is it the dark, coming back again?”
“No,” said Kim. “I can feel it, too. Listen. .”
JC came out from behind the bar to join the others, and they all stood close together. Listening. The sound of the storm outside seemed to fade away, retreating into the distance, just so they could hear what was coming. Voices. . voices that seemed to come from every direction at once, drifting in from all around them. A slow susurrus of human voices, whispering. Rising and falling, but slowly growing in volume. Spoken conversations, shouted arguments, raucous laughter, and the sobbing of broken hearts. More and more voices, from everywhere at once, filling the whole bar from end to end. Growing steadily louder and more distinct.
Voices, voices, more and more of them, entire crowds of men and women fighting to be heard. Other sounds arose in the background: what might have been fights, with broken furniture; lovers’ quarrels; the raucous singing of disreputable songs. Everything you might expect to hear from every kind of bar.
But it seemed to JC that there was something strange, something decidedly off, about these distant and disembodied voices. Many of them were oddly accented, with the kind of extreme dialects you don’t hear any more. Harshly pitched voices, speaking the kind of English that hadn’t been spoken for centuries. And as the clamour of voices rose to an uproar, JC was sure he could hear other languages mixed into the general hubbub-Norman, Saxon, Celtic, Latin-all the old lost tongues of England. And some things JC couldn’t even recognise. England’s linguistic history had always been full of strange bedfellows.
“A whole army of dead voices,” said Melody, raising her voice to make herself heard above the din. “It’s like everyone who ever patronised this pub has come back, for an after-life reunion.”
“All human life is here,” said JC. “And all human death, apparently.”
Finally, the ghosts appeared. Grim, grey, roughly human shapes, glowing with their own unnatural light as they came walking through the walls from every side at once. Some slipped in through the main door, as naturally as you please, while others came tripping down the backstairs. More and more of them, filling up the bar with their cold, spectral presence. Some rose out of the floor, while others dropped down from the ceiling, following stairways and entrances that had existed once, long ago, in earlier incarnations of the building that eventually became the King’s Arms. When it was an inn, a tavern, a meeting-house.
Melody and Happy moved quickly to stand back-to-back.
“Hold your ground,” said JC, sternly. “They’re only ghosts. We can do ghosts.”
And still they came, forcing their way in, an endless flow of the dead, walking right through the tables and chairs, and even each other. Glowing figures overlapped as they tried to occupy the same limited space, dressed in clothing and outfits and even rough armour, from a hundred different periods of Time Past. All of them talking at once, the terrible clamour rising and falling. . And yet even through the din, JC slowly became aware that he couldn’t hear any sounds of movement from the ghosts. No footsteps, no bodies jostling against each other.
And, he couldn’t fit a single voice to any particular ghost. As though the voices and the apparitions came from different places.
Melody opened her lap-top on the bar-counter and fired up. She used her scanners to pick out images from the most-recent-looking ghosts, then set them against local records, trying to put some names to the deceased faces. Hoping to work out who they were and why they’d come back. JC could tell from her face that she wasn’t having much luck.
“There’s one good thing,” said Happy.
“Really?” said Melody, without looking up from what she was doing. “Tell me. I’d love to hear it.”
“There are two faces I don’t see anywhere in this spooky crowd,” said Happy. “I don’t see Adrian Brook or his Lydia. Their spirits aren’t trapped here. They got away.”
“You’re right,” said JC. “That is a good thing. Not a terribly useful piece of information, but. .”
“I don’t do useful,” said Happy. “What do you want? Miracles?”
“Yes, please,” said JC. “I could use one if you’ve got one about you. I swear this case is wearing me down. Every time I think I’ve got it worked out, it changes gear and speeds off in another direction.”
“Hello,” said Melody. “This is interesting. .”
“In the absence of a miracle, I’ll settle for interesting,” said JC. “What have you got, Mel?”
“Look at the ghosts,” said Melody. “They’re avoiding us. According to my scanners, there’s a perfect circle around us that the ghosts aren’t entering. They actually change direction at the last moment, to avoid it.”
“Yes!” said Kim. “I can feel it. It’s you, Melody! Or, at least, you and your lap-top. You’ve established a circle of scientific reality that the ghosts can’t enter. I’m standing right at the edge of the circle, and it is weirding me out big time. As though scientific reality itself is trying to push me away because it doesn’t believe in me. It’s like a very loud voice telling me I don’t exist. If I didn’t know better, I think I’d find that very upsetting. These ghosts all around us. . they’re simply memories, trapped in this building. Slowly disintegrating, down the centuries, into little more than sound and fury and increasingly unstable images. Not really proper ghosts at all, to my mind. .”
She gestured dismissively at the ghosts as they came near, and a grey hand shot out of the crowd and fastened onto her wrist. Kim looked at the hand in shock, unable to believe anything could actually touch her. And then she was dragged sharply out of the scientific circle and hauled away into the crowding ghosts. If she did cry out, she couldn’t be heard above the raised voices.