Страница 13 из 50
JC looked at her carefully. “Are you sure, Melody?”
“Of course I’m sure. Off you go. I can cope.”
JC nodded. “We won’t be long.” He gri
Happy’s eyes got really big. “Are you kidding? Are you out of your mind? You want me to go wandering around this place on my own?”
“Yes,” said JC. “What’s the matter? You want someone to hold your hand?”
“Yes!” said Happy. “Preferably someone I know.”
“Go,” JC said sternly. “Be a big brave ghost finder, and there’ll be honey for tea.”
He waved one elegant hand around and strolled away, humming a merry tune. Happy made a really vile gesture at JC’s immaculate back, produced a bottle of pills from nowhere, and defiantly dry swallowed three of mother’s little helpers, one after the other. He looked at Melody, but she was making a point of giving all her attention to the equipment ranged before her. Happy sighed, and his shoulders slumped. He shuffled towards the exit arch, like a small boy on his way to school, knowing that the school bully was waiting.
They thought he was scared all the time because he was a coward. The truth was, only he could see the world clearly enough to know how truly scary it was. He saw things and heard things, and every single one of them was real. Horribly real. If Humanity knew what they shared the world with, what walked their streets by day and snuggled up beside them at night; if they could see it all, just for a moment . . . they’d all go stark staring mad. Happy had learned long ago not to talk about it. People didn’t want to know. But he had no choice. If the Boss knew what he faced every day, she’d give him a medal. Or, if she was really feeling kind, a lobotomy. And maybe then he’d get some peace at last.
Ghosts are the only ones who never have to feel scared. Because the worst thing in the world has already happened to them.
It didn’t take JC long to decide that the whole of the Oxford Circus Tube Station was infected. Everywhere he looked, something looked disturbed, subtly alien. It was hard to judge distances in the unrelentingly fierce light. He walked down one platform for ages, without reaching its end. Eventually he had no choice but to turn around and go back; and there was the exit he’d come in by, waiting for him. Directions become treacherous and signs untrustworthy. The same archway took him to a dozen different places, including one painfully over-bright corridor that twisted and turned like a maze. The angles between floor and wall seemed subtly wrong, and his head ached trying to figure out why. And what shadows there were were very dark.
He particularly didn’t like one tu
Everywhere he went, the tu
As though there was something obscurely loathsome about them that he ought to know, ought to recognise. While he still had time.
JC strode up and down the white-tiled corridors, investigated every platform, and made a point of peering into every single tu
For all his studiedly calm exterior, JC knew enough about his job to be sensibly cautious. But he also knew, or thought he knew, enough about the situations he faced every day . . . to be pretty sure of what needed doing to put things right. He knew things, had taught himself things, that the rest of his team never knew about, and that the Boss would almost certainly not approve of. JC believed in being prepared, and very heavily armed, at all times; and some of the things he carried in the i
He stopped abruptly, half-way down a platform, and looked around. He was almost certain he’d been there before; but everywhere he looked, things seemed subtly different. As though certain details were changing, in slow and sneaky ways, right before his eyes. Someone was playing tricks on him. He walked slowly forward, and the posters on the wall beside him stirred lazily, the details seeming to blur and shimmer, rearranging themselves before his eyes. An ad for the new James Bond movie was suddenly an old propaganda poster from World War II, when whole families huddled together deep in the Underground, sheltering from the bombs of the Blitz. A simple cartoon, backed up by a government admonition to keep your mouth shut in case of spies: Be Like Dad; Keep Mum. The cartoon father-figure turned its simple head and winked an eye at JC. Blood ran from its mouth.
JC reached out to touch the poster, then pulled his hand back again. He had a sudden horrible intuition that it might plunge on into the poster, as though into a deep pool. He made himself walk on, as outwardly casual and unconcerned as ever. The next poster shouted the wares for some new overblown sci-fi epic. As JC watched, the improbable starships, with their blazing energy beams stabbing across the starry night, faded slowly away, revealing instead a stark and brutal poster entitled: What You Should Do in the Case of Sonic Attack. It made scary reading. At the top was a date: 35 October, 2118.
JC kept walking, increasing his pace slightly, glancing at the posters he passed. Scenes seemed to slip and slide, slyly re-creating themselves. Disturbing images clung to the wall, becoming strange windows into unsettling alien worlds and strange dimensions, all of them accompanied by unfamiliar text—the kind of writing you see in dreams, rich and meaningful, packed with a terrible significance and urgent warnings you can’t quite seem to grasp. JC walked faster and faster, wanting to see as much as possible while he could. He was fascinated. What would have u
And yet, at the same time, a small but very real voice insisted on being heard, informing him that the only reason he was so immersed in his work . . . was because he had nothing else in his life he cared about. He never allowed himself to think that out loud. Not even when he lay awake in his single bed, in the early hours of the morning when the dawn seems furthest away . . . when a man’s thoughts turn almost against his will to what he’s made of his life as opposed to what he meant to make of it. When he looks back at his past, and sees nothing to value, or into his future . . . and sees nothing but more of the same. JC had always been a loner, even before the Carnacki Institute found him; and if his work was all he had, it was more than most people had.