Spirits from Beyond Read Free Page B

princess.”
    JC smiled at him. “You would, too, wouldn’t you?”
    “Of course!” said Happy, surprised and even a little outraged that JC could think otherwise. “She might be your girl-friend, but she’s our team-mate, too.”
    “Damn right,” said Melody. She draped an affectionate arm across Happy’s shoulders. “He’s very sentimental, on the quiet.”
    “Of course,” said Happy. “There are limits. I’m giving Kim ten more minutes, then I’m going back to wait in the car. With the heater full on.”
    “Sentimental, but practical,” said Melody. And then she stopped, grabbed Happy by the chin, and jerked his head around, so she could look him straight in the eye. “Happy, what is wrong with you? You’re shaking all over, and it isn’t from the cold. Are the psychic impressions here really that bad?”
    “This whole area is saturated with weird energies,” said Happy, jerking his chin free. “And I mean, really strange stuff. It’s all information, you see, soaked into the surface of the world, radiating back and forth like emergency broadcasts from Heaven and Hell . . . And it’s getting more difficult all the time to keep it outside my head.”
    Melody checked the readings on her scanner again. “I’m not picking up anything I’d consider . . . out of the ordinary.”
    “Science is limited,” said Happy. “Science deals with the surface of the world, not what’s Below or Above.”
    “Compared to your marvellous mutant mind, I suppose,” said Melody, testily.
    “Yes,” said Happy.
    “Oh come on,” said JC. “It can’t be that bad. I See stuff too, sometimes, but . . .”
    He broke off. Happy was glaring at him.
    “You never get it, do you? What it’s like to See the world as it really is, all the time, to know what’s really going on, all around us. All right! See the world through my eyes, for once!”
    He grabbed JC and Melody by the arms; and immediately, all three of their minds were linked tightly together by the sheer force and power of Happy’s telepathy. He couldn’t have done it with anyone else; but the three of them had linked before. They weren’t just everyday Ghost Finders, after all.
    The everyday view of London in the morning disappeared, replaced, or rather overwritten, by a larger view. The world around them was suddenly packed full of life and death, Heaven and Hell, and everything in between. Overlapping layers of spiritual and spatial dimensions, interspersed with spiralling moments of Time. Past, Present, and any number of Futures, all happening at once. Ghosts coming and going, following paths that didn’t exist any longer in the physical world. Stone tapes everywhere, ghostly images imprinted on their surroundings, playing back loops of repeating Time, over and over again.
    JC almost cried out, as he saw old images of the A team who died inside Chimera House. Jeremy Diego, Monica Odini, Ivar ap Owen. Legends in their field; caught by surprise and killed in a moment. Still there, held forever in a repeating moment, like insects trapped in amber. Forever going to their deaths, and not knowing it. And there was nothing JC could do to help them or even warn them.
    He’d never liked them much. Somehow, that made it worse.
    More images now, layer upon layer, with people from every period of history, all shouting at once. An endless din of dead voices. Unfinished bodies walking in and out of buildings as though they weren’t even there. Because they weren’t, once. Dead men and women walking in and out of each other, teeming like the unseen microscopic images that swarm in a drop of water. How many ghosts can dance on the head of a pin? Depends on the tune . . .
    More voices, more sounds, human and inhuman. Great booming Voices, shouting at the world from Outside. Sounds that might have been screams or laughter, or human interpretations of Voices beyond our comprehension. The dead, reaching out for answers, or comfort, or simple human