Voices From Beyond (A Ghost Finders Novel)

  “You’ve really been banging her?” said Sally. “You’re old enough to be her father! And then some . . . No wonder she got her own show so quickly. Does she make you do nasty, demeaning things in bed?”

  “You have no idea,” said Jonathan. “And I loved every bit of it . . .”

  “You should have talked to me first,” said Tom. “I could have told you things . . . You have no idea how much she’s been around. Or how much rough ground she’s covered . . .”

  “If we could please concentrate on the matter at hand,” Felicity said coldly. She fixed her attention on JC. “Who are you people? Really? What can you do?”

  “We’re professionals,” JC said calmly. “No-one knows more about weird shit than us.”

  “Then you have encountered situations like this before?” said Felicity.

  “Well, no,” said JC. “Not exactly like this.”

  “But you do know what to do, to stop it?”

  Melody made a noise that suggested she strongly doubted it.

  “Do you at least know how to protect us?” said Felicity.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Happy.

  “Then what gives you the right to call yourselves professionals!” said Felicity.

  “Who else have you got?” JC said flatly. “Who else can you turn to? The interview is over, Felicity. Accept . . . that we know enough about this sort of thing to know how much trouble we’re in. That’s something.”

  “I feel so much safer,” said Captain Sunshine.

  Sally stood up abruptly. “I don’t care. I don’t care what anyone says! I don’t feel safe here, and I can’t stand being in this room any longer. I am leaving! And there’s nothing any of you can say that will change my mind.”

  That was when all the alarms built into Melody’s array went off at once. Bells and sirens and flashing lights. Melody was up and out of her chair immediately, heading for her equipment, with Happy right behind her. She quickly had her fingers flying over her keyboards, her eyes darting from screen to screen. Sally stood where she was, frozen in place. Not sure whether to sprint for the open door or find something to hide behind.

  “Did I do that?” she said. “I didn’t do anything!”

  “What is it?” said JC, raising his voice to be heard over the din of the alarms. “What’s going on, Mel?”

  “You remember the things called tachyons that aren’t actually tachyons?” said Melody.

  “Sort of,” said JC.

  “They’re everywhere!” said Melody. “Massive energy spikes, coruscating temporal discharges and more kinds of strange radiations than I’ve ever seen in one place before!”

  “But what does it all mean?” said Jonathan.

  Happy’s head jerked back suddenly, as he stared up at the ceiling. “Incoming!”

  Objects appeared out of nowhere and fell from the ceiling. Hundreds of them, falling slowly at first, but quickly gathering speed. To begin with, they were hard to look at directly, only coming into focus completely as they fell through the air. By the time they reached the floor, they were all of them hard and solid and moving at speed. Some hit the polished wooden floor-boards hard enough to crack them, while others pierced the wood and stood upright, quivering with the violence of the impact.

  Everyone in the reception area scattered the moment Happy yelled his warning. They ran to the edges of the large room and hugged the walls, pressing their backs flat as they watched the objects fall. Even Melody was forced away from her precious instruments because she knew they could protect themselves and she couldn’t. Only Kim stayed where she was, staring about her with childlike wonder, because she knew she couldn’t be touched or harmed by any of the falling objects. Finally, JC had to yell at her, to get her to move. Because he didn’t want any of the others to see solid objects passing through her insubstantial form. On the grounds that might tend to give the game away. So she went to join him at the nearest wall, and they huddled together. Not quite touching.

  More and more things appeared silently, blinking into existence under the ceiling, then falling down into the reception room. All kinds of things, all shapes and sizes; some immediately recognisable, most not. Falling and tumbling, like a hailstorm from a junk-shop. Like all the things you’d ever lost or misplaced, turning up again all at once. Nothing too big, nothing too small, falling down to form a great pile of assorted bits and pieces that covered the centre of the reception area.

  Until finally objects stopped appearing. The last few pieces fell into place on the pile, and were still. A sudden silence fell across the room, as all of Melody’s alarms snapped off. Even the flashing lights shut down. And one by one, everyone moved away from the walls, shooting quick glances up at the ceiling. They advanced, carefully and cautiously, on the huge pile of assorted objects.

  “No more incoming,” said Happy. “Knew I should have brought my umbrella.”

  Melody hurried back to her instruments. None of the objects had even come close to touching her array. She muttered soothingly to her machines in case they were worried.

  Jonathan only moved a few reluctant inches away from his wall. He looked at JC. “Is it safe to come out now? Is it over?”

  “Yes,” said JC. “Unless it isn’t; in which case, no.”

  “Experts,” said Felicity, disgustedly.

  She was already leaning over the great pile of objects, studying them closely. Jonathan moved slowly forward to join her. Tom and Captain Sunshine circled slowly round the pile, looking it over from what they hoped was a safe distance. Kim stuck close to JC as he considered the situation thoughtfully.

  “Melody?” said JC. “Do you have anything useful to tell me?”

  “It’s all quiet now,” said Melody, her eyes darting from one readout to another. “All the energy spikes have collapsed, no exotic radiations . . . it’s clear all across the boards. Whatever that was, it’s over. For now.”

  “But what was it?” said Sally. She seemed torn between a need to edge closer to the still-open front door and a fascination with all the things that had arrived out of nowhere.

  “That was an apport,” said Melody. “An old technical term from the occult for things that appear or fall out of nowhere. A typical example of naming a thing without in any way describing or explaining it.”

  “Like tachyons?” JC said innocently.

  “I will hit you,” said Melody.

  Jonathan glowered at Captain Sunshine. “If you even look like you’re about so say Groovy . . . I will slap you.”

  “Understood,” said the Captain. “But it is . . .”

  They all moved gradually closer to the piled-up objects, taking their time. Still glancing up at the ceiling now and again. They studied the accumulated objects with cautious interest, careful to look but not touch. Leaning well forward, bent over at the waist, with hands stuffed into pockets or held behind their backs, to be on the safe side. But as they drew closer, curiosity soon trumped caution, and one by one they reached out to touch various objects in the pile, then remove them and study them close-up. Turning things this way and that in their hands, growing more confident as nothing bad happened, trying to get a sense of what these sudden arrivals were and where they’d come from. And why they’d ended up in the reception area.

  JC prodded a few things with a cautious fingertip, to make sure they were really real, then shrugged and joined in picking things up to examine them. Kim peered over his shoulder. Melody came out from behind her machines once it became clear even her best short-range scanners couldn’t tell her anything useful. She knelt by the pile and thrust both her hands in, digging through the objects for something of worth or interest. Happy stood beside her and let her do it. He didn’t pick up anything himself, but he did take a polite interest in everything Melody selected. Felicity pulled a face every time she touched something, but she couldn’t resist getting involved. Tom and Jonathan picked things up and passed them back and forth between them. And so it went, until people started finding th
ings no-one would want to touch.

  “JC,” said Jonathan, “do these look like . . . human bones, to you?”

  “Yes,” said JC. “Quite definitely human. All kinds. Charred, broken, and splintered. Gnawed on . . . And fairly recently, too.”

  “So these are . . . tooth marks?” said Tom.

  “I’d say so, yes,” said JC. “Really big teeth, too. In fact, I’d be hard-pressed to name any living creature in this world that could make those marks and do so much damage . . .”

  “Maybe they’re not from around here,” said Happy. “Maybe they’re from the future . . .”

  Everyone stopped what they were doing to look at him. And then they looked at the pile of things that had appeared. And the ones they were holding.

  “Apports from the time to come,” said Happy. “It does make a sort of sense. If voices can come back through Time, why not objects? And who knows what kind of creatures they’ve got running around in the world that will replace ours? Remember those nasty animal sounds we heard, JC, when you asked the voice what it really sounded like? They didn’t sound like any creature we might know or would want to meet.”

  “I’ve found a few things I recognise,” said Tom. “Bits and pieces of this station’s equipment. Smashed and torn apart but still recognisable.”

  “Are you sure, Tom?” said Jonathan.

  “I should be,” said Tom. “I’ve taken everything in this entire station apart and put it back together again more than once. Trying to keep things going, on a budget no self-respecting proper engineer would accept. Some of these things are compromise arrangements I cobbled together, to keep Radio Free Albion operating and on the air . . . Because putting in a request for a replacement would take too long. Where the hell did all this come from?”

  Sally hugged herself tightly, holding herself together. She stayed apart, unable to bring herself to touch anything. “Don’t you mean when did it come from? I don’t like this. I don’t like any of this!”

  Kim looked at her approvingly. “Well done, dear! You’re getting the hang of things nicely!”

  “I don’t want to get the hang of things!” Sally said miserably. “I want to get away from here. I want my life back.”

  “I feel like that a lot of the time,” said Happy.

  JC knelt, to sort through some fire-damaged materials. Pieces of clothing, torn and soaked with blood, some of it still wet to the touch. Most of the materials were too far gone to identify. He sat back on his haunches and looked over the pile.

  “The only thing it all seems to have in common,” he said slowly, “is that everything here could have originated in Murdock House.”

  “This definitely did,” said Felicity. She held up the burned and charred remains of a poster. Enough of it remained, that they could all recognise it as the poster on the far wall, behind the reception desk. Saying WELCOME TO RADIO FREE ALBION. The poster on the wall was still there, completely undamaged. Everyone looked back and forth, from the poster on the wall to the one Felicity was holding. The same poster, in two different places. The one in Felicity’s hands was already crumbling and falling apart. Too fragile to last long now. She pulled a face and dropped the remains back onto the pile.

  “But why is it here?” asked Captain Sunshine. “Why is any of this stuff here? It makes no sense.”

  “These are clues from the future,” said Melody. “Warnings about what’s going to happen. Presumably they’ll start to make more sense as we draw closer to the conditions that will produce them.”

  JC picked up a pair of cracked and broken sunglasses. He knew them, immediately. They were exactly like the ones he was wearing; only these very dark lenses were covered with a web of cracks and splashed with blood.

  What happened to your eyes? he’d said. They took them back, his future self had said.

  He closed the shattered sunglasses carefully and slipped them into an inside pocket of his jacket. Right next to the bloody handprint.

  “I’ve got it!” said Melody.

  She scrambled back onto her feet and hurried over to her equipment array. Everyone watched interestedly as she worked her keyboards, glancing from one monitor screen to another. She spoke to the others without glancing up from what she was doing. “The tachyons are the clue! It’s all about Time . . . My computers have been running tests on the various voice recordings, all this time, using the best filters and sophisticated comparisons . . . All the good stuff.” She stopped suddenly to look at Captain Sunshine. “It occurred to me: if you could have two different versions of the same object, why not two different versions of the same voice? No wonder you thought you recognised the voice that phoned you, on the air. It was your own voice, Captain.”

  She fiddled with her controls and played the recording through her array’s speakers. And without the distortion built into the incoming voice, everyone recognised both voices immediately. Now they knew what to listen for. Captain Sunshine stood very still. For the first time, he looked genuinely shocked, and shaken, as he listened to two versions of his voice talking to each other.

  Take it easy, man, said the Captain. Be cool. The Captain is right here. And then his own voice answered him. Get out of there! Oh God, please listen to me . . .

  “It is you,” said Felicity, fascinated almost in spite of herself. “That was your voice, both times. Remember that old woman, who phoned into my show, earlier? She said she recognised the voice . . .”

  “This is seriously weirding me out,” said the Captain, barely hanging on to his cool. “What do you think it means?”

  “Something really bad is going to happen,” said Melody. “Something so bad, it’s sending ripples back through Time. From the future to the Present. Like a haunting in reverse.”

  “Can this future be stopped?” said Sally. “Or at least avoided?”

  “If we did stop it,” said Felicity, “there wouldn’t be any really bad thing happening, to impress itself upon Time and send its ripples back into the Past. Our Present. The very fact that we’re experiencing these warnings means the future is inevitable.”

  “We’re all going to die!” said Sally. “I’m not ready to die!”

  “Time doesn’t work like that,” said Melody. “Tell her, JC.”

  “There are an infinite number of time-streams,” JC said confidently, “and, therefore, an infinite number of potential futures.”

  “Are you sure about that?” said Jonathan.

  “Not as sure as I’d like to be,” said JC, looking at the pile of future apports. “We could run, I suppose. But if the future that’s coming is as bad as it seems, there might not be anywhere to run to . . .”

  “The world will end tomorrow,” said Happy.

  “Stop saying that!” said Felicity. “You can’t be sure of that!”

  “Yes I can,” said Happy. “I’ve seen the world that’s coming. And I think it’s fair to say that if I weren’t already heavily medicated, I would be very upset. I don’t think I want to be around when it happens . . .”

  “We can still stop this,” JC said firmly. “We can work together, to understand the warnings and figure out what we need to do.”

  “Are you sure about that?” said Jonathan.

  “Of course,” said JC. “I have to be. Because all the other alternatives are unacceptable.”

  EIGHT

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  SEE WHAT’S COMING

  In the end, JC had to shout everyone else down to get them to pay attention to what he was saying. When they finally settled into a rebellious silence, he glared round at them all impartially.

  “Do you understand what I’ve been saying?” he said, loudly. “Because it is really important that you do! All those voices you’ve been hearing are your own voices. Your voices, from your future selves. You are the ghosts who’ve been haunting Radio Free Albion.”

  Felicity glared right back at him, openly challenging everything he said and his authority to say it. “So you keep saying, M
r. Expert! In the face of all reason and sanity. But even if that is the case . . . what do you propose to do about it?”

  JC sighed, quietly and inwardly. He’d known someone was going to say that. Like somehow this was all his fault and therefore his responsibility to fix it. He took a deep breath and considered his words carefully.

  “Think about it: all these voices from the future, reaching back through Time, trying desperately to warn us. But it still isn’t clear about what. Or what they want us to do. So I say, why not ask them? Let’s make contact with these people in the future, these older versions of ourselves, and get them to spell it out. Tell us exactly what it is that’s coming, and what we need to do to prevent it.”

  “How do we do that?” said Jonathan, sounding like someone trying very hard to be reasonable in the face of extreme provocation.

  “Some of us have already encountered future versions of ourselves,” JC said carefully. “Happy, Melody, and I have all seen what’s in store for us.”

  “Here?” said Tom. “At Murdock House? Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Because all of these encounters were . . . disturbing,” said Melody. “Not the kind of thing you want to talk about.”

  “You’ve actually spoken to your future selves?” said Sally. “Did they tell you anything?”

  “Wasn’t that kind of encounter,” said Happy. “Everything we saw was horrible. We don’t die well, any of us. I always suspected that came as standard, once you signed up with the Carnacki Institute. But it still comes as a shock, and a kick to the heart, to see yourself dead and know for a fact you’re not going to rest in peace.”

  “We still have a chance to change that,” said JC as firmly as he could manage.

  “But how can we make contact with the future?” said Sally. Her voice was wavering, but she was still hanging on to her self-control, if only by her fingertips. “How is that even possible? I mean, unless you’ve got some kind of time machine tucked away in that array of yours, Melody . . .”

  “Not as such, no,” said Melody. “I have enough problems dealing with the Present and all its troubles without dragging in other options. I think we need to keep this simple. They’ve been talking to us, so maybe they’re listening. Waiting for a response, a reply. We need someone capable of shouting loudly enough to attract their attention.”