Ghost of a Dream (7 page)

“Then stop looking at him!” said JC. “Put up your shields! Keep him out!”

“I’m trying! I’m trying! Damn, he’s strong!”

Happy’s back slammed up against the far wall. There was nowhere left for him to go; and the ghost was still advancing. Melody came rushing out from behind her instruments and put herself between Happy and the ghost of Dr. Todd. His expression didn’t change; but he stopped dead, right in front of Melody. His hands came up from his sides and clutched her shoulders. She cried out, in shock as much as pain, as the terrible cold hit her. She shook and shuddered under his touch, the fierce cold stabbing through her like knives. A layer of frost formed on her face, covering her eyeballs like cataracts.

JC ran forward, grabbed Melody by one arm, and hauled her out of the way. The ghost had no physical strength to hang on to her. He didn’t even look aside as Melody disappeared from in front of him. His cold gaze remained fixed on Happy. Melody fell to one knee, shaking and shuddering. Happy moved quickly out from in front of the ghost to kneel beside her, throwing his arms around her, using the warmth of his own body to drive the cold out of hers. The ghost turned to glare at him. JC moved to put himself between the ghost and his partners, whipped off his very dark sunglasses, and showed what he had for eyes to the ghost of Dr. Todd. They glared brightly, fiercely, in the gloom, like the sun come down to touch the Earth; and Dr. Todd could not face the light. He backed away, slowly, seeming to glide as much as walk, until he came to a halt on the far side of the room.

Melody scrubbed roughly at her face with both hands,
brushing the frost away. Her skin was blue-white, almost bruised, but already fierce spots of angry colour were returning. She moved restlessly inside Happy’s arms, and he immediately let her go and stood up, letting Melody get to her feet under her own strength. She could be funny about things like that. JC replaced his sunglasses.

“Dear God, man,” said Laurie. “What the hell happened to your eyes?”

“Work-related injury,” said JC. “I let some demons get too close to me during a haunting down in London’s Underground. They very nearly killed me; but something from Outside reached down and touched me, giving me the strength I needed to save myself. I’m more than I was; and you can see it in my eyes.”

“Something from where?” said Laurie. “From Heaven?”

“Undecided, as yet,” said JC.

“Don’t you think you should try to find out?” said Laurie. “You’ve been marked. But is it a sign of grace or a sign of ownership? I think you owe it to yourself to find out the true nature of your benefactor—if only for your own peace of mind.”

“Trust me,” said JC. “It is right there on my list of Things to Do.” He looked across at Melody and Happy, and they both nodded quickly to show that they were themselves again. “Happy, keep trying to read that ghost. Get something out of him. But don’t let him get inside your head. Melody, it’s research time. I need to know everything you can find about Dr. Emil Todd. What’s his story, and what connection does he have to Bradleigh Halt?”

“I’m on it,” said Melody, already back behind her rank of instruments, fingers stabbing stiffly at her keyboards as she accessed the relevant files on her computer. “The Institute still has an open file on Dr. Todd, as an unsolved case…But it is really heavily restricted, JC, for several pay grades above ours. This is the kind of information the likes of you and I aren’t supposed to even know exists.”

“You’ve been hacking the restricted files on your own time again, haven’t you?” said JC.

“Yes,” said Melody.

“Good girl,” said JC. “Now tell me things I need to know.”

“Dr. Todd disappeared, late in the year 1878,” said Melody. “Same year as the missing train…And according to this file, it’s all connected to something called the Ghost Caller. This is pretty obscure stuff, JC. Old-time information, much of it second hand; I’m not sure anyone at the Institute knew about this stuff before we were sent in.”

“Except we can’t be sure of anything where the Carnacki Institute’s concerned, these days,” Happy said darkly.

“The Ghost Caller,” said Melody, talking over Happy with the ease of long practice. “Also known as The Call For The Dead. No definite information here about what it was or how it worked. Presumably some kind of Victorian steampunk break-through, to produce a machine we have yet to duplicate.”

“Mostly because any sane person would have more sense than to build anything that calls ghosts,” said
Happy. “Anyone with two working brain-cells to bang together knows it’s in everyone’s best interests to keep the dead at arm’s length.”

“Ah, but it wasn’t always like that,” said Melody. “The Ghost Caller, this incredible machine, was the brain-child of Dr. Emil Todd, (almost certainly not his real name,) one of the greatest and most popular mediums of Victorian times. When they were all going mad for Spiritualism, and raising the ghosts of the departed, so they could make contact with loved ones on the Other Side. Dr. Todd toured the country with his act, appearing in all the biggest theatres, putting on spectacular shows. He produced spirit voices, visions, ectoplasm, and extended conversations with the dearly departed of people in his audience. Charged a pretty price for admission but always gave the people their money’s worth. He was, briefly, a national sensation. But he’d barely been in the big time a year before he was exposed as a fake and a fraud. He really did do most of it with mirrors. And ventriloquism, conjuring tricks, and plants in the audience. All very obvious, in retrospect. A jumped-up showman, with delusions of grandeur. He was ruined, abandoned by the audiences who’d adored and believed in him. He was hounded from the stage and forced into early retirement. Had to go into hiding, for his own safety.

“And then he disappeared. As suddenly and completely as one of his own stage effects.

“With anyone else, the story might have ended there, but Dr. Todd was made of sterner stuff. He was determined to restore his reputation by presenting the public with something undeniably real. So he took the extensive
fortune he’d amassed and spent pretty much all of it in having the Ghost Caller created for him. An apparently very impressive device, for which no contemporary description survives, but powerful enough to call ghosts to it, like moths to a bright light.

“However, before Dr. Todd could demonstrate the Call For The Dead on stage, he was shut down by the Queen’s champion of that time, the legendary Victorian Adventurer, Julien Advent. He confiscated the Ghost Caller because of the threat it posed. Not to the Nation, but all Humanity. Apparently, the machine was so powerful that once its Call began, anything, and by that I mean anything at all, could be summoned into our reality from any of the Outer Reaches. Ghosts, demons, abhuman monstrosities—you name it. An irresistible Call, a summons with no limit to its reach…Who knows what that might have let in. There are always things Out There, lurking on the threshold of our world, waiting for an invitation…”

“We’re talking about the Great Beasts, aren’t we?” said Happy. “The Abominations, the Entities from the Outer Reaches.”

“You might be,” said Laurie. “I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.”

“Be grateful,” said Happy.

He moved away, to be on his own for a moment. One hand deep in his trouser pocket closed around a pill bottle. Melody had worked hard to keep Happy from depending on chemical supports, mostly by having lots of sex with him whenever he looked like weakening. But really, all she’d done was distract him. And she couldn’t be there all the time. The problem remained the same: that Happy
saw, heard, and sensed far more of reality than was good for him. He needed his special medications to shut his telepathy down to bearable levels, to keep the hidden world and all its horrors outside his head. He’d hoped that sex, and maybe even love, might be enough; but they couldn’t give him the peace of mind the pills could. Or the strength. Happy was not a strong man. He never had been. And he knew it. He had done his best to keep off the pills because it meant so much to Melody; but at times like this, faced with imminent dangers from Awful Things from Beyond…Happy reached for the only real strength he’d ever known.

His hand closed tightly around the pill bottle; but he didn’t take it out. Not yet.

Happy didn’t know, but JC had already talked with Melody about providing Happy with some kind of experimental tech support. Some kind of machine, to keep the bad stuff outside Happy’s head. But Melody had been forced to admit she’d already tried everything she could think of, and she could think of some pretty extreme things. Not one of them had worked. She’d failed Happy and failed herself. She wasn’t used to that. JC and Melody hadn’t told Happy any of this. They didn’t want him to give up hope. Because Happy needed hope more than anything.

And Happy wasn’t the only one.

“This…Ghost Caller,” JC said to Melody. “Is it something I could use, to call Kim back to me?”

“Not a good idea, JC,” Melody said quietly. “The Ghost Caller was, by all accounts, anything but subtle. You can’t choose whom you want to call. There’s an On/Off
switch, to open and close a Door. And God alone knows what might be waiting on the Other Side.”

“Hold everything,” said Happy, turning back to face them. “Didn’t I hear something recently about an Apocalypse Door? A Door to give you direct access to the Hereafter? Am I remembering that right? Could that be something like our Ghost Caller?”

“Not really,” JC said patiently. “The Apocalypse Door allowed you to open the Gates of Hell. It was destroyed by the Droods.”

“Why would anyone…?” said Laurie.

“Don’t go there,” said JC.

“The Ghost Caller doesn’t give you access to the Hereafter,” said Melody. “It sends out an open call to the restless dead. Of which there has never been any shortage…” She thought for a moment, then sniffed loudly. “What we could really use is a Ghost Repellent. Something to send ghosts away.”

“Some kind of spray, perhaps,” Happy said brightly. “Something in a can—Ghost Away! I’d pay good money for a can of that.”

JC gave Melody a look, and she resumed telling Dr. Todd’s story.

“It seems that Julien Advent took the Ghost Caller away from Dr. Todd, despite his strong and even violent objections. And put the device on a train, under guard, to be taken to a place of safety. Where it could be studied, and, if necessary, dismantled. The files don’t say where this would have taken place…Probably the original Dark Heir Headquarters, down in Cornwall. That was the main repository, back then, our very own Area 51, for
all the really dangerous weird shit that the world wasn’t ready for. Is it Area 51, the Americans use, these days? I get mixed up, there are so many stories…”

“It’s Area 52,” said Happy, unexpectedly. “Situated in the Antarctic Circle, up past the McMurdo Sound. So if anything should go suddenly and unpleasantly and explosively wrong, there’s no-one around to be killed, maimed, or nastily transformed. Except a few penguins.”

“There aren’t any penguins in the Antarctic,” said Melody.

Happy glared at her. “They had some moved in, for camouflage.”

“You’ve been working your way through the forbidden files I downloaded, haven’t you?” said Melody. “Good boy. There will be treats later.”

“Young rebels in love,” said JC. “The horror, the horror…Get on with the story, Melody. It’s getting late.”

“Later than you think,” said Laurie. The others looked at him, but he had nothing more to say.

“Anyway,”
said Melody. “Pressing on. Enter Dr. Todd, again. It seems he was now so scared of the Ghost Caller, and what it could do, that he wanted it gone. Destroyed, or at the very least, made safe. Apparently he didn’t trust what Her Majesty’s Government of that time might do with it. So he made a deal with Someone, or Something, presumably the same Power that made the Ghost Caller for him in the first place, and had them send the Ghost Caller…Away. You have to understand, though, all of this is conjecture, put together after the fact. No-one knows anything for sure.”

“Oh, I think we can make some pretty good guesses,”
said JC. “The Ghost Caller was placed on a train, which entered a tunnel, and was never seen again! Because it was sent Away, out of our reality, to some Other Place. So no-one else could have it. And Dr. Todd’s ghost is here to guard the station, to frighten people away…so no-one could do anything that might bring the train back again. He’s stood guard all these years, to protect us all from the terrible machine he made.

“But the volunteers came and made changes in the station, changing the conditions that helped keep the train Away…And now there’s a dimensional weak spot where the accumulated pressure has burst through. A doorway, or at least a potential doorway, between here and Away.”

“You think the missing train is coming home, at last?” said Laurie.

“And bringing the Ghost Caller with it,” said JC.

“All right, I’m sort of with you,” said Happy. “But none of that explains why the top of Dr. Todd’s head is missing.”

“One thing at a time,” JC said cheerfully. “Let’s go out onto the platform again. See what there is to see.”

“It’ll all end in tears,” said Happy. “Probably mine.”