Whispers Under Ground Read Free

you doing?’ asked Lesley.
    ‘I’m making the world a better place,’ said Macky.
    ‘It’s a ghost,’ said Abigail incredulously.
    ‘You brought us here,’ I said.
    ‘Yeah, but when I saw him he was thinner,’ said Abigail. ‘Much thinner.’
    I explained that he was feeding off the magic Lesley was generating, which led to the question I always dread.
    ‘So what’s magic, then?’ asked Abigail.
    ‘We don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s not any form of electromagnetic radiation. That I do know.’
    ‘Maybe it’s brainwaves,’ said Abigail.
    ‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘Because that would be electrochemical and it would still have to involve some kind of physical manifestation if it was going to be projected out of your head.’ So just chalk it up to pixie dust or quantum entanglement, which was the same thing as pixie dust except with the word quantum in it.
    ‘Are we going to talk to this guy or not?’ asked Lesley. ‘Because otherwise I’m going to turn this off.’ Her werelight bobbed over her palm.
    ‘Oi Macky,’ I called. ‘A word in your shell-like.’
    Macky had returned to his art – finishing up the shading on the H in EACH.
    ‘I’m busy,’ he said. ‘I’m making the world a better place.’
    ‘How are you planning to do that?’ I asked.
    Macky finished the H to his satisfaction and stepped back to admire his handiwork. We’d all been careful to stay as far from the tracks as possible but either Macky was taking a risk or, most likely, he’d just forgotten. I saw Abigail mouth Oh shit as she realised what was going to happen.
    ‘Because,’ said Macky and then he was hit by the ghost train.
    It went past us invisible and silent but for a blast of heat and the smell of diesel. Macky was swatted off the track to land in a crumple just the below the X in EXCELLENT. There was a gurgling sound and his leg twitched for a couple of seconds before he went quite still. Then he faded, and with him his graffiti.
    ‘Can I stop now?’ asked Lesley. The werelight remained dim – Macky was still drawing its power.
    ‘Just a little bit longer,’ I said.
    I heard a faint rattle and looking back towards the mouth of the tunnel I saw a dim and transparent figure start spraying the outline of a balloon B.
    Cyclical , I wrote in my notebook, repeating – insentient?
    I told Lesley she could shut down her werelight and Macky vanished. Abigail, who had cautiously flattened herself against the wall of the tunnel, watched as me and Lesley did a quick search along the strip of ground beside the track. Halfway back towards the entrance I pulled the dusty and cracked remains of Macky’s spectacles from amongst the sand and scattered ballast. I held them in my hand and closed my eyes. When it comes to vestigia , metal and glass are both unpredictable but I caught, faintly, a couple of bars of a rock guitar solo.
    I made a note of the glasses – physical confirmation of the ghost’s existence – and wondered whether to take them home. Would removing something that integral to the ghost from the location have an effect on it? And if removing it did damage or destroy the ghost, did it matter? Was a ghost a person?
    I haven’t read even ten per cent of the books in the mundane library about ghosts. In fact I’ve mostly only read the textbooks that Nightingale has assigned me and stuff, like Wolfe and Polidori, that I’ve come across during an investigation. From what I have read it is clear that attitudes towards ghosts, amongst official wizards, have changed over time.
    Sir Isaac Newton, founder of modern magic, seemed to regard them as an irritating distraction from the beauty of his nice clean universe. There was a mad rush during the seventeenth century to classify them in the manner of plants or animals and during the Enlightenment there was a lot of earnest discussion about free will. The Victorians divided neatly into those who regarded ghosts as souls to be saved and those who thought them