Ghost of a Smile

  “Is this like the sixties?” said Happy. “When people thought that taking lots and lots of LSD would turn them into superheroes? The mind’s true liberation, through frequent frying of your neurons? Trust me—that really didn’t work out too well.”

  “You think so small,” Patterson said coldly. “Little man. Touched with the gift to see the world clearly, and all you’ve ever done is complain about it. Wake up and smell the gravitas! We weren’t supposed to be like this! We weren’t supposed to suffer, to get ill, to get old and die! ReSet will set us free from all that. We will go on and live lifetimes and become what we were always supposed to be!”

  JC considered him thoughtfully. “What if these New People you’ve brought about aren’t human? What if they don’t look like us, think like us, feel like us?”

  Patterson smiled. “Would that really be such a bad thing? Would the complete replacement of Humanity be such a great loss?”

  “Okay, someone’s taken the train to freaky town,” murmured Happy.

  “Why are you here now?” said JC, moving up another step towards Patterson. “Why show yourself to us? You’ve been conspicuous by your absence, until now.”

  “You were never really meant to get this far,” said Patterson. “I let you in because . . . we had to let somebody in. We needed someone to clear up the mess. All the unpleasant side effects to our glorious creation. But now it falls to me to stop you here. To stop you interfering with things you’re incapable of understanding or appreciating. My organisation has plans for the New People. And we can’t have you upsetting them with your unwanted presence.”

  “Given everything we’ve overcome and dealt with to get this far,” said JC, “how do you plan to stop us?”

  Patterson actually smirked, he was so pleased with himself. “You think you’re the only one to quietly remove useful and highly dangerous items from the Carnacki Institute Armoury? Look what I’ve got here . . .”

  He extended one hand, so they could all see what was nestling on his palm. A small black box, gleaming and glistening, covered with rows of curling brass sigils. Everyone looked at the box, then looked at Patterson.

  “I have to say,” said Melody, “I have eaten things that looked more interesting than that.”

  “Hell,” said Happy. “I’ve crapped more interesting things than that.”

  “Typical,” said Patterson. “I show you a wonder of the world, and all you can manage is vulgarity. This . . . is a Boojum. Because it makes things softly and silently vanish away. I say the Word, and whatever I point the box at . . . isn’t, any more. You’re all going to disappear, right here, and no-one will ever know what happened to you. You’ll be a small part of the great Chimera House Mystery—all the people who worked here, or walked in one night and were never seen again.”

  “Cut the crap, Patterson,” said Melody. “I hate it when people give cute names to machines. Boojum, my arse. Lewis Carroll has a lot to answer for. That box is nothing more than a simple dimensional frequency adjustor. Took me a moment to recognise it, it’s so primitive. I built one of those when I was sixteen! Out of bits and pieces I ordered from the back pages of the Fortean Times!” She looked at JC and the others because they were all looking at her. “We all have our own basic frequencies, that tell us which dimension of reality we belong to. Or possibly vice versa. That box changes people’s frequencies, so that they drop out of this reality and into another one.”

  “And you built one when you were sixteen?” said Happy.

  “Well,” said Melody, “I didn’t say it actually worked . . . But the theory was sound.”

  “So,” said JC, “that box is still basically a Boojum, for all practical intents and purposes, in that it can make us all disappear. Do you have any defence against it, Melody?”

  “If I had my equipment with me . . .”

  “I’m going to take that as a no,” said JC. “So hush now, children, while daddy negotiates.” He smiled engagingly at Patterson. “Let’s start with a basic Why? shall we . . . ? Why did you, or your unseen lords and masters, set out to create the ReSet drug in the first place? Did you know it would create New People?”

  “Let’s just say we had hopes,” said Patterson.

  “But Gog and Magog, in their own Beastly way, were quite convinced the New People are going to destroy the world,” said JC. “Tear down human civilisation because they don’t need it. Remake the entire world, and perhaps even reality itself, in their not-at-all-human image. How will your organisation profit from that?”

  “Oh, I don’t think things will get that far,” said Patterson. “There are checks and balances in place . . . things going on behind the scenes, behind the scenery of reality, to ensure nothing too bad happens. Pieces have been moved into place to take advantage of the situation. But I think I’ve said quite enough. You don’t need to know any more. It’s time for you to go.”

  He held up the Boojum, and JC produced his Hand of Glory. The two men said their activating Words, pretty much in unison . . . And the small black box and the small withered paw both vanished, gone in a moment, blinking out of existence simultaneously as two great powers cancelled each other out. Both men looked at their empty hands, and it was all very still and very quiet in the stairwell.

  JC launched himself up the intervening steps and threw himself at Patterson. They slammed together and wrestled fiercely in the confined space. Happy and Melody charged up the stairs, while Kim shouted fierce encouragement to JC. Patterson forced JC off him, with a great effort, and swung wildly at his attacker, who ducked aside at the last moment. Patterson’s strength and momentum carried him right past JC and over the stairwell’s railing, and out into the void. He grabbed the railing with a last desperate effort, and hung on to it with one hand, dangling over the long, long drop. He looked down, then up at JC. Happy and Melody crowded in on either side of JC, and the three of them looked at Patterson. Kim hovered above them all.

  None of them moved to help Patterson. Great beads of sweat appeared on his dark face as he hung helplessly, unable to pull himself back up. He glared up at them but said nothing. He wouldn’t beg. JC regarded him dispassionately, and when he finally spoke, his voice was so cold it actually shocked the others.

  “For all the people who died here, because of you. For all the lives you ruined, through the ReSet drug. For killing the policemen and the security men. For creating the New People and endangering the whole world . . . For being a traitor to the Carnacki Institute, and the whole of Humanity . . . It falls to me to pass judgement on you.”

  “JC?” said Kim. “What are you doing, JC? You can’t just kill him . . .”

  “Yes, I can,” said JC. “For all he’s done and all he’s made possible—yes, I can kill him.”

  “Hold it, hold it, take it easy,” Happy said quickly. “JC, I can see where you’re going with this, but don’t. We can’t kill the man. He knows things, JC. We need to know who he’s working for, if there are other traitors inside the Institute, and everything these people are planning!”

  “I’ll never tell,” said Patterson. He swung slowly from his single handhold, making no attempt to pull himself up. “I’d rather die than have them angry at me. There really are fates worth than death.”

  “You aren’t actually going to kill him, are you, JC?” said Kim.

  “For God’s sake, JC,” said Melody.

  “‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,’” said JC. “But he isn’t here right now, and I am.”

  He slammed his fist down on Patterson’s hand. The dark fingers sprang open under the impact, and Patterson lost his grip. He fell like a stone, screaming all the way down. JC watched him fall and wouldn’t let himself look away until he lost sight of the man in the gloom of the stairwell. The scream cut off abruptly, and JC finally turned away.

  “Damn, JC,” said Happy. “That was . . . hardcore. I’m not saying you were wrong, necessarily, but . . .”

  “You killed him,” said Kim, looking at JC as thou
gh she’d never seen him before.

  “It’s part of the job, sometimes,” said Melody. “We’re trained to kill the bad guys, if necessary. If there’s no other way.”

  “Yeah,” said Happy. “But there’s a difference between taking out a threat in the heat of the moment and a cold-blooded execution. I mean, I never liked Patterson, but he was one of us. Still a part of the Carnacki Institute.”

  “Yes,” said JC. “One of us. That’s why I did it.”

  He led the way up the last remaining set of steps, and one by one the others followed him up, all of them watching him thoughtfully, in their own ways.

  All too soon they ran out of stairs and stood together looking at the last set of closed swing doors. None of them made any move, for quite a while. JC finally reached out a hand to the doors, then snatched it away again as a great Voice was heard, filling the stairwell, filling their heads. Not a human Voice, not even human words, but still it seemed to JC and the others that Something called to them, summoned them, to come to the final floor and account for themselves.

  “What the hell was that?” Melody said hoarsely. “It was inside my head . . .”

  “It went right through all my shields and barriers as though they weren’t even there,” said Happy. “And no, JC, I’m still not picking up anything else. That wasn’t telepathy. It didn’t feel anything like telepathy.”

  “The power,” said Kim. “The sheer power . . .”

  “If they’re that powerful, we’d better not keep them waiting,” said JC. “In we go, children. Best foot forward and try not to show me up.”

  He pushed the doors open and strode straight in, and the others followed right after him.

  JC kept walking, even though he wasn’t sure where he was any more. He could feel the pressure, the sheer presence of the New People, even before he could see them. An overwhelming impact, as though their simple existence had stamped itself onto reality so completely, it was hard to feel anything else. He finally stumbled to a halt, stopped in his tracks by the sheer alien strangeness of the situation. A fierce, unnatural light with no obvious source suffused everything, a light painful even to his altered eyes, and a great Sound filled the air, without beginning or end. JC felt it in his bones and in his soul as much as heard it. He knew that he was in the presence of something unknown, and perhaps even unknowable.

  The others had stopped with him. Happy and Melody and Kim huddled close together for the simple comfort of human contact. They all had their eyes screwed up against the light, and the sound and the heavy presence of a place not meant for human kind. Kim seemed as much affected as any of the living.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” Happy whispered, like a child in a cathedral. “We don’t belong in a place like this.”

  “Chin up, my children,” said JC, as clearly and calmly as he could manage. “Yes, I would have to say that we are in the presence of things unknown . . . But that’s the job, when you work for the Carnacki Institute.”

  “I resign,” said Happy.

  “Shut up, Happy,” said JC.

  He took off his sunglasses and looked around. In this new place his eyes hardly glowed at all. It was as though the golden light was nothing compared to the harsher light of what had been the top floor of Chimera House. JC nodded slowly, and put his shades back on.

  “We have a job to do,” he said flatly, “And we’re going to do it together. Because it’s our duty, and our responsibility, to the Institute and perhaps all Humanity. And because we’re the best damn team in the Institute, and we don’t back down from anything. Right?”

  “Right,” said Happy.

  “Damned right,” said Melody.

  “If I weren’t already dead, I think I’d be very worried,” said Kim. “But yes, of course you’re right. Let’s do it.”

  They all moved slowly forward, pushing against the presence of the New People, like swimmers breasting a heavy tide.

  The light seemed to fall away some as they moved on, revealing the substance and details of the place in which they found themselves. Huge abstract shapes loomed up everywhere, weird mutated structures that watched and observed. Great pyramids with massive unblinking eyes; jagged energies crackling up and down the air like slow lightning; blurred uncertain shapes that had the feel of living things. Wherever JC looked there were colours he couldn’t name, objects with too many details for the human eye to encompass, and nightmare forms on the edge of his vision that shrieked of bad intent . . . And always, everywhere, the feeling of potential doors, or even trap-doors, that led Somewhere Else. Doors to let things In as well as Out . . .

  The New People were waiting for them. Four of them. Standing inhumanly still in the middle of everything, untouched and untroubled by the world around them. The world they’d made, or perhaps a world that appeared to accommodate who and what they were now. Often it seemed that there were more than four of them, dozens or even hundreds, in infinite ranks, superpeople in a superposition, everywhere at once. Their number and location was constantly changing, and yet at the same time there were only four, standing before JC and his group, waiting. JC squeezed his eyes hard shut, and then opened them again, but it didn’t help. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing was actually happening, or whether it was his mind trying to make sense of an impossible situation.

  He couldn’t look at the New People directly; none of his group could. They shone too brightly, they were too real, too overpoweringly there. Stamped on this world like an identifying imprint. Each of the New People existed in more than three dimensions at once. They had length and width and breadth, and other things, too. Other dimensions, physical and spiritual dimensions.

  Happy couldn’t cope with what he was seeing, or experiencing, even with his shields in place. He dropped to his knees and vomited noisily. Melody crouched beside him, partly to comfort and protect him, partly so she didn’t have to look at the New People any more. She didn’t vomit, but she looked like she wanted to. JC understood. It hurt him to look at them, even with his blessed eyes. The New People existed in spiritual dimensions as well as spatial. The human brain wasn’t equipped to deal with so much information at once.

  And all the time, JC was thinking . . . Is this what we were meant to be? What we all should have become? Or is this what we were spared?

  Kim moved in close beside JC, gazing uncertainly at the New People. “I can’t see them,” she whispered. “It’s all just light to me. Why can’t I see them?”

  JC shook his head vaguely, then turned his whole body away from the New People. It didn’t help. He didn’t need to see them to know they were there. Their presence overlaid everything.

  The longer JC and his people remained in the new place, the more they saw. Contact with the New People opened their inner eyes, opened up their minds, to the noumenon—all the adjacent levels of reality, the worlds within worlds, or surrounding worlds, the interpenetrating and overlapping worlds that most of us are mercifully unaware of. All the places and all the things that exist right next to us, blessedly hidden from normal view. Because if most of Humanity knew who and what we shared this world with, they’d go stark, staring mad. JC had seen some of it before, through his golden eyes, but never as much as this.

  He shut his golden eyes and still caught glimpses of other places, other worlds, other dimensions, where life had taken on shapes and aspects far beyond the possibilities of this limited Earth. He saw two suns shining fiercely in a sick green sky, over a landscape that was always moving, never still. He saw dinosaurs with huge, distended heads stalk purposefully through stone galleries and massive tunnels, carved into the side of a mountain. He saw a dull red sun drop sullen bruised light from a mustard yellow sky, over man-sized insects that crawled all over a stone mound the size of a skyscraper, darting in and out of deep dark holes in its sides, intent on unknown missions.

  JC cried out, and put his hands to his head. He thought he said, Too much, too much, but he couldn’t be sure. His thoughts came painfully fast, idea u
pon idea, rushing through his mind, darting this way and that beyond his control, as he fought to understand and assimilate a dozen improbable things at once. Sudden sharp insights slammed into his head, insights into the nature of reality itself. Blindingly obvious . . . but he was never able to remember them afterwards. Or at least, not in any way that made sense. Except sometimes in dreams . . . from which he woke cold and sweating, crying out, gripped with a nameless horror.

  He sat down suddenly, and Kim hovered over him uneasily. JC gritted his teeth together, and concentrated on being the master of his own mind, the captain of his soul. And slowly, piece by piece, he put his thoughts back together again. And when he opened his golden eyes, he was at last able to cope with what he saw.

  And one of the first things he saw was Happy, pushing away Melody as she tried to stop him dry-swallowing a handful of pills from various containers. JC forced himself back up onto his feet and went over to Happy, who abruptly stopped what he was doing and let more pills fall from an open hand. He looked at JC and his eyes were wild, almost feral.

  “Guess what, JC? You were right all along! The drugs don’t work!”

  JC still stumbled doggedly towards him, Kim floating timidly at his side. Even with his renewed mental discipline, he was still seeing things. Great inhuman faces, with incomprehensible expressions, watching, watching. They seemed to come from all directions at once, and some things that weren’t even directions. Strange things moved through the air, filling up the spaces between spaces, like the micro-organisms that roil and riot in a drop of water. They shot this way and that, passing through things and people and even each other. And then there were large forms, so big JC couldn’t even guess at what they were, moving through the building and its contents as though they were the ghosts.