“The things we do, for love,” said Happy.
He reached out, through the link he’d made between a dead girl and a living man, and gave them both a little of his Sight. Brook and Lydia turned their heads, to stare in a direction beyond the sight of the living. And it was over. The Past disappeared and the original room reasserted itself. It looked much the same: old-fashioned, but with dust everywhere. Lydia was gone, and Brook lay dead on the floor. JC knelt beside the body and checked for a pulse. Not because he had any doubts but because that was what you did. He got to his feet and nodded to Happy.
“Good work. This isn’t quite the ending I had in mind, but I suppose it will have to do. It’s over. And that’s all that matters, really.”
“It doesn’t feel over,” said Happy. He rubbed wearily at his eyes. “Dear Lord, I am so tired . . . This has taken a lot out of me, you know.”
“Yes,” said JC. “I know. It’s taken a lot out of all of us.”
* * *
They left the room, and JC closed the door firmly behind them. They walked back down the landing, past perfectly ordinary doors, all of them closed, and went down the stairs to the main bar.
“How does the upper floor feel to you now, Happy?” said JC.
“Empty,” said Happy.
“That’s all?”
“Afraid so.”
“Damn,” said JC. “I was hoping for more than that. Oh. What happened to the people we rescued from the Timeslipped rooms?”
“Brook sent them back to town,” said Happy. “The road was flooded by the storm, so he sent them back over the fields. Slogging through thick mud and pouring rain and heavy winds . . . They’ll be soaked to the skin by the time they reach Bishop’s Fording. But that could be a good thing. Keep them distracted enough that they won’t start asking awkward questions till later. And hopefully by then, we’ll be out of here.” He looked at JC. “Not often we get to save people’s lives. It’s a good feeling.”
“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
THERE WERE GIANTS IN THOSE DAYS
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.
JC immediately went to go after her, but Happy and Melody grabbed him by both arms and dragged him back. He fought them for a moment, then stopped and stood still, breathing hard. Happy and Melody let go of his arms and stepped back, and watched him anxiously.
“You have to stay in the circle, JC,” Melody said carefully. “We’re only safe from the ghosts as long as we stay inside the circle.”
“It’s all right; really!” said Happy. “It’s not like Kim’s in any danger; she’s a ghost, right? She can’t come to any harm.”
“You don’t know that,” said JC. “They were able to touch her. And ghosts can be hurt. I found that out down in the London Underground.”
“That was different!” Melody said firmly. “That was Fenris Tenebrae; these are common or garden everyday ghosts. Kim’s been around; she’s not just any ghost, now. She can take care of herself. You’re the one who might be in danger out there. We don’t know what’s going on here, JC. We have to be careful.”
JC nodded abruptly. He hadn’t actually calmed down, but he did his best to seem more in command of himself. He looked at Melody, then at her lap-top.
“Talk to me, Mel. Explain to me what’s happening. I am prepared to accept informed guesses.”
“It’s Time,” said Melody, her attention fixed on the information streaming across her lap-top screen. “Time is breaking down in the King’s Arms. As in: Time doesn’t seem to be as tightly nailed down at the corners as it ought to be. Linear Time is being disrupted, under direct attack from the sheer power of a storm that’s been building for centuries.”
JC turned to Happy. “All right, you explain it to me.”
“It’s all concerned with the terrible anger generated by the death of the blonde woman all those years ago,” said Happy. “Her sacrifice, in a local place of power, gave birth to Something the Druid priests never anticipated—a great scream of rage given shape and form and power by an unsuspected bad place. So that Something set in motion long ago is still happening. Growing, building in strength, searching for a way to break into our reality. The storm we hear . . . is the smile on the face of the tiger.”
“Could you be any more vague?” said JC.
“If you want,” said Happy. “Look, the storm started long ago. Back in the Druid days. The rage of the sacrificed victim got mixed up in it and gave it focus. Something’s held it off, all these years, but now it’s back. And it’s mad. Tell me you’ve got it now, JC. Because all I’ve got left is mime and finger-painting.”
“I get it,” said JC. “You’re saying that maybe we had it wrong before. The storm wasn’t the cry of the blonde woman. Just the opposite. Everything that’s happening here, from the rooms to the blonde woman to the ghosts, was really a manifestation of the storm.”
He glared about him, into the shifting, overlapping layers of ghosts that filled the main bar from one end to the other. Rank upon rank of shimmering grey figures, some more human or more complete than others. All of them constantly moving and stirring, never still for a moment. There was a general air of . . . restlessness, as though they were all lost, or searching for something they couldn’t quite remember. They walked through walls and furniture and even the far ends of the bar-counter.
Still more ghosts came walking in, through the walls and the windows and the closed main door. Some seemed as solid as any real person while others faded in and out, wisps of human-shaped mist. Some had strange lights inside them that came and went, while others seemed oddly out of focus, as though not entirely sure who they were.
“I’ve never seen this many ghosts in one place at once,” said Melody.
“Call Guinness,” said Happy. “And yet . . . I have to say, JC; they’re not actually frightening, as such. And I am an expert when it comes to being frightened. They don’t feel . . . threatening.”
And then he broke off and fell back a step. Some of the ghosts were starting to notice that there was one place in the bar they couldn’t get into. They’d been banging up against the perimeter of an invisible circle of reason for some time; but now more and more of them were turning their dead gaze on the one place they couldn’t go. They turned their heads to look in that direction, with their cold, unblinking eyes, and those on the perimeter crowded up against the invisible barrier. They pressed slowly forward, taking a slow, steady interest in the three living souls inside the circle. And not in a good way.
The ghosts could see them now.
The crash of voices shut off in a moment, replaced by an intent, watchful silence. The ghosts stopped moving. They stood still, staring into the circle. An army of ghosts, with only one thought and one interest in common. To get in.
“Still think they’re not dangerous, Happy?” said JC.
“Something’s changed,” said Happy. “I can feel it.”
“Why are they looking at us?” said Melody, one hand resting protectively on her lap-top. “What do they want?”
“What do ghosts usually want?” said JC. “The one thing they can’t have. Life. Rooms aren’t the only things with unnatural appetites.”
“You’re not making me feel any better,” said Happy. “I really don’t like being looked at like this.”
“But we’re protected!” said Melody, her voice rising. “We had to go through all kinds of training, at the Carnacki Institute, before they’d allow us to go out into the field. Reinforcing our auras against possession, putting in extra layers of psychic protection, so we’d be safe from . . . Things like this!”
“You might want to mention that to these ghosts,” said Happy. “Because they don’t seem to know that.”
“It’s the bloody local power source,” said JC. “They’re drawing on it to sustain their existence . . . Or, more likely, it’s using them to get at us. The local power source is the storm! Or it’s the rage that drives the storm. Or Something. I swear, this whole case makes my head hurt . . . Either way, the Big Bad has tried every other way to get at us, so now it’s using the one thing the King’s Arms has more of than anything else—ghosts.”
“Yes, but they’re still just ghosts,”
said Melody. “Like you said. We can handle ghosts. They can’t reach us inside this circle.”
“Maybe,” said JC. “Who knows what ghosts can do when you put this many of them together? When it comes to things like scientific reality, I don’t think things are as clear-cut here, as everywhere else.”
The ghosts were pressing really close now, right up against the edges of the circle. JC and Happy and Melody huddled close together, looking quickly back and forth to make sure nothing was sneaking up on them. The ghosts were looking right at them, with cold, empty eyes. The sheer presence of so much death in one place was almost unbearably oppressive. JC could feel his heart hammering in his chest. It was getting harder to breathe. Like he had to fight for every breath of air. Some of the ghosts put their hands against the invisible barrier of the circle and pushed. The lap-top burst into flames on the bar-counter, and the scanners exploded. The first ghostly fingertips pushed forward, through the barrier.
Some of the ghosts were smiling.
JC stepped forward, whipped off his sunglasses, and glared right into the faces of the ghosts nearest him. They recoiled, falling back as though thrust away by some unseen force, unable to bear the pressure of JC’s golden, glowing eyes. But others immediately pressed forward to take their place, stepping right through the retreating ghosts. None of them could actually meet JC’s altered gaze, but it affected some more than others. And he could only look in one direction at a time. The ghosts were surging forward from every side now, and the protective circle seemed to be shrinking. JC looked desperately back and forth; and the ghosts looked back at him.
“So many ghosts . . .” said Happy. “I’ve never seen so many in one place, even in the oldest parts of London.”
“What’s calling them here?” said Melody.
JC put his sunglasses back on. “Can’t help feeling I’m getting less and less mileage out of my gaze.”
“Maybe the world’s getting used to it,” said Melody.
JC looked at her. “What does that mean?”