Voices From Beyond (A Ghost Finders Novel) (25 page)

She was feeding him poison, death in small doses, and they both knew it.

All the colour dropped out of Happy’s face as he forced down the pills. Sweat broke out in heavy beads all across his forehead, then coursed down his face, to drip off his nose and his chin. His hand shook inside Melody’s. But he got them all down; and then sat back in his chair, breathing hard. Like a runner before a race; like a warrior before a battle; like a man scared out of his mind by what he was doing but doing it anyway.

Not for the world, or even for the future. For the woman he loved.

“How are you feeling, Happy?” said Melody.

“I don’t know . . . Hot. Sick. Exhilarated and enlightened. Everything seems so far away from me. Including me. Better do this soon, Mel. While I still remember what it is I’m supposed to be doing.”

“I have to talk to JC for a moment,” said Melody. “I won’t be far.”

“That’s what you think,” said Happy.

“Man,”
Captain Sunshine said respectfully. “That was what the blessed Timothy Leary would have called a properly Heroic Dose. Are you sure you can find your way back from the trip you’re going on?”

Happy didn’t answer him. He didn’t look as though he’d even heard the Captain. His face was flushed and twitching and running with sweat. His gaze was fixed on something far away, something he didn’t like looking at. JC moved in beside the Captain.

“Happy will have a life-line,” said JC. “Melody’s building it right now.”

Melody worked hard behind her machines, ripping bits out from here and there, improvising wildly as she cobbled together something she hoped would do the job. The others wanted to watch, but JC knew Melody didn’t take kindly to being observed, so he chivvied everyone into taking seats around the reception desk, setting them in a rough semicircle facing Happy. One look at his strained face, and his wide staring eyes, was enough to make them all distinctly uneasy. Sally didn’t want to be there at all, but the Captain persuaded her, and made a point of sitting next to her. Jonathan and Tom kept looking at JC, hoping for some sign of reassurance. Felicity scowled at him, making it clear that as far as she was concerned, whatever happened next was all his fault.

“The machines are working,” Melody said finally. “Renewing the necessary conditions for a controlled temporal break, a direct link between the Present and the future, cutting out the middleman and slamming the edges together.”

“How?” said Tom, desperately trying to understand. “How is any of that even possible?”

“It wouldn’t mean anything to you if I did explain, which I probably couldn’t anyway, so what’s the point?” Melody said reasonably. “I’m making this shit up as I go along. What amazes me is how often that works . . . Hello; we’re getting something.”

They all looked at her. Her array of instruments shook and juddered, rattling on their supports and bouncing up and down. Strange lights blasted out of the monitor screens, and dark, crackling energies danced on the air above the array, like fuzzy ink-blots staining the air. Melody carefully withdrew her hands from the keyboards.

“Okay, that’s interesting. The computers seem to be doing the rest of the work on their own, programming themselves. Crafty little beggars; they’ve been holding out on me. Ah well, time for phase two. Work your worry beads if you’ve got them.”

She grabbed her cobbled-together piece of tech and carried it out from behind the array, holding it out before her as though it was both very fragile and very dangerous. She knelt and placed it carefully on the motorised trolley, which hummed loudly and importantly to itself. Melody then unrolled a length of heavy cable, plugged one end into her shaking array and the other into the back of the machine on the trolley. She went back to her array, slapped at one of the jumpier computers until it settled down, then studied her readouts for a long moment. She nodded to herself in a satisfied but still-uneasy way, and tapped a series of cautious commands into her main keyboard. The trolley chugged steadily away, out into the open centre of the reception area, the heavy cable unravelling behind it. The trolley reached its destination, a carefully judged distance away from everything else, and stopped.

“Right,” said Melody. “That particular piece of tech should act as a homing signal, or beacon, for Happy’s mind to hang on to. So he can find his way home. Not a particularly pretty piece of tech but not bad for something I knocked together in a hurry. In fact, I’m not at all sure I understand how it works . . . I get the feeling I may have picked up the necessary information from this room. Happy said the aether here was saturated with information. I think . . . our future selves sent back the necessary information, along with their voices, and we’re only picking it up now we need it. Clever future selves . . . Anyway, once we’re ready, I’ll goose the array, and it should establish our bridging tunnel. Then it’s up to Happy to shout his head off. Happy . . . Happy! Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, I can hear you,” said Happy. His voice seemed as distant as his eyes. He didn’t look at her.

“The tech is your anchor, Happy! Don’t lose hold of it, no matter how far you send your thoughts. It’s your way home.”

“How are you feeling, Happy?” said JC.

“I wish people would stop asking me that,” said Happy. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not really, no,” said Melody.

He looked like shit. They could all see that. But none of them wanted to say it.

“I am large,” said the telepath. “I contain multitudes. And they’re all running round and round in my head, fighting to get out.” He turned his head slowly back and forth, seeming to finally take in the people seated before him. His eyes were large and dark and unblinking. “I can See you all . . . shining, so very brightly. If you could only see how wonderfully you all shine, in the dark of the world . . . Let’s do it.”

Melody’s hands moved quickly across her keyboards. The motorised trolley trundled forward a few yards, went round and round for a bit, then stopped as it found exactly the right place. It beeped self-importantly, and the mechanism it carried glowed suddenly, in a series of brisk pulses.

Everyone sitting around the reception desk sat up straight in their chairs and looked quickly about them. They could all feel something forming in the room, gathering strength and purpose. A growing presence, as though another person had appeared in the room. Happy’s chemically augmented mind reached out in some new direction that they could all sense but not name.
Happy,
they all thought.
It’s Happy. He’s doing it. He’s really doing it.

Melody’s machines roared and chattered as they blasted all kinds of light around the room. She had to turn her head and look away from some of them, they were so bright. Deep, impenetrable shadows gathered, at the furthest edges of the reception area, as though something were closing in. The trolley jumped up and down in place, but the piece of tech it was carrying didn’t seem to be doing anything at all. The conditions weren’t right yet. Happy sat very still in his chair, his face empty, but they could all feel the power gathering around him. Nothing they could see or hope to understand; but they knew it was there. There was a sense . . . of a gulf forming. Like staring down into a deep, deep well, with something at the bottom, staring back.

“This is it, people,” Happy said suddenly. In a perfectly normal voice. “Here we go. Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a very bumpy ride, and you don’t want to be thrown off.”

The room shuddered violently, as though the whole building had taken a direct hit. Murdock House seemed to lurch from one side to the other, then back again. The floor rose and dropped back. Everyone cried out, holding on to their chairs and each other, like passengers on a ship that had struck something unexpected. JC dropped into a chair by the reception desk and hung on grimly.

“What was
that
?” yelled Felicity.

“Timequake!”
yelled Melody.

“What does that even mean?” said Jonathan.

“Beats the hell out of me,” said JC. “Brace yourself and hang on.”

And then their voices were drowned out as a cacophony of horrible sounds broke out all around them. JC recognised them immediately. It was the same awful animal sounds he’d heard before, up in the studio. Grunts and howls, screams and the sound of things dying. Sounds of hunting, and killing, and feasting. A terrible appetite pulsed on the air, heavy and overpowering, so physical they all felt they could reach out and touch it. Or it could touch them.

And oh, it’s so hungry.

The animal sounds raced round and round them, closing in and falling back, like nocturnal creatures emerging from the jungle shadows to study their prey around a camp-fire. A great force was building, establishing itself in unnatural ways. Everyone sitting around the desk was crying out now, despite themselves—raw sounds of horror and fear. Even JC and Melody, experienced as they were. But not Happy. He sat very still in his chair, his hands resting loosely in his lap. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut: either because he didn’t want to see what was happening or because he didn’t need to. He was smiling. A wild, exultant, death’s-head grin.

Flashing visions filled all their heads, brief glimpses of other worlds, come and gone in a moment, as a new reality fought to impose its own conditions on theirs. The future, elbowing the Present aside. Raging fires broke out all over the reception area: fierce but without heat. As yet. The flames weren’t clear enough, weren’t real enough yet. The walls of the room silently exploded, rushing away in all directions, receding into the distance. As though they could no longer contain all the space inside them. The floor and the ceiling vanished, dismissed by a new reality that didn’t need them any longer. Because they would only have got in the way of letting everyone see the new world.

The world that was coming. The future.

Everywhere they looked, the world was on fire. Great flames leaping up, into a sky raining blood, and shit, and streams of maggots. Great jagged cracks split the sky apart, opening it up, so that Something could peer through from the other side. Cities exploded, buildings blown away on a terrible bright wind. Whole city blocks dropped into the earth, swallowed up by crevices appearing suddenly beneath them. Roads collapsed or tied themselves in knots. And all around, things and people fell into bottomless pits or were snatched up and carried away or burned for no reason.

It was the end of everything, the end of the world that was. A terrible future being born.

A new set of operating conditions replaced the old. The light curdled and spoiled, becoming feverish and foul. Almost unendurable to merely human eyes. Massive trees burst up out of the cracked ground, forcing the earth apart as they exploded into the rotten air. Driving up, like nails driven down. The ground acquired a covering of flesh, of skin. Stretched taut, flushed and sweating, heaving in slow, sluggish waves. The trees were big as buildings, bigger, and made entirely of meat. Their branches thrashed violently, clutching at the air like grasping tentacles. Living things ran through the meat forest, horrible creatures, hunting and being hunted. They jumped and ran and slithered through the living jungle. Huge and small and everything in between, they fell upon each other with boundless hate and hunger. Everything feasting on everything else. Killing and being killed, eating and being eaten, over and over again.

Because death was not an end, here.

People, recognisably human people, were running and hiding and screaming helplessly as awful things pulled them down. Men and women were torn apart, eaten up . . . dying horribly everywhere. Because that was all that was left for them to do, in this newborn future world. They never stood a chance. They were prey, there to be played with.

“Oh God,” said Melody. “I know this . . .”

Her quiet voice cut clearly through the bedlam. Perhaps because she was so much closer, or realer, than anything else.

“You know this?”
said Felicity.

“JC, we’ve seen this place before!” said Melody.

“Of course we have,” said JC. “From the students, and their séance. This is the world of the Beast.”

“You mean you’ve been here before?” said Jonathan, his voice rising hysterically. “How the hell . . .”

“We get around,” said JC. “On another case, we had to break into a world like this, to rescue some kidnapped souls. We brought them safely home again; and we shut the door behind us. I know we did. But I’m starting to wonder . . . whether we should have locked it, too.”

“Talk to us properly!” Tom said angrily, using his anger to hold his fear at bay. “Tell us what’s going on! We need to understand what’s happening!”

“The world we entered wasn’t this world, exactly,” said JC. “It wasn’t the future, then. It was another world, another place. We defeated the Beast; and I thought that was it.”

“It’s our future now,” said Melody. “Unless we do something. Happy? Happy! Have you made contact yet?”

“We closed the door after us; but the door was still there,” said Happy. Not looking at her, not looking at anything. “We left a trail of bread-crumbs, and the Beast followed us home. And brought its home with it. Time means nothing to the kind of things that see it from the other side. The Beast has come, will come, through the door . . . and it brings the rules of its own reality with it. It wants revenge on us, JC; and oh, it’s so hungry . . .”

“Concentrate, Happy!” JC said harshly. “Remember what you’re doing, and why! The bridging tunnel is in place. Yell out to our future selves! Make them hear you! Make them talk to us!”