Ghost of a Chance (12 page)

“This is a woman thing, isn’t it?” said Erik.

“I could just eat him up,” Natasha said dreamily. “I’m sure his ghost will prove to be particularly tasty.”

Erik said nothing. There were some things about his companion that freaked even him out.

They stood together at the top of the escalator, looking down. All was still, and quiet.

“Time to go to work,” Natasha said abruptly. “Time to ambush the good and virtuous, throw them down, and trample them underfoot.”

“I don’t know,” said Erik. “I’m getting a really bad feeling about this. Something bad has come to Oxford Circus. Something far worse than we’ll ever be. Don’t tell me you can’t feel it, too, oh mighty Class Ten.”

“Whatever it is, we can handle it,” said Natasha.

“Probably,” said Erik. “But why should we? Why not let JC and his people take the risks and soak up the punishment? Then we can move in afterwards, while they’re weakened and off guard, kill them, and take the captured prize for ourselves.”

“Every now and again you justify your presence as my partner,” said Natasha. “Set up your equipment, little man, and let’s take a peek at what our good friends and rivals are doing down there.”

“You’d be lost without me,” said Erik. “Heh-heh.”

He took off his back-pack and lowered it carefully to the ground, as though it contained something breakable and highly explosive. He untied the heavy restraining straps, one by one, and carefully lifted out his latest creation. It wasn’t in the least aesthetic, a brutally functional transparent cube containing rapidly moving parts, with a living cat’s head jammed on the top. Wires sprouted from shaved points on its skull. The cube was an intricate clock-work mechanism, in which all the swiftly moving pieces were made of solid light and shaped energy, blazing fiercely with more colours than the human eye could cope with. The movements alone could make your brain hurt if you looked at them too long, as they rotated through more than three spatial dimensions. The cube ticked and tocked, but not regularly. It raced and paused and speeded up again, like a clock driven mad by seeing too much of the wrong kind of Time. Erik had put a lot of work into crafting the world’s first far-seeing computer, and he was very proud of it. He patted the living cat head fondly, and it hissed and spat at him. Its unblinking slit-pupilled eyes were full of rage. Its thoughts enlarged and expanded through its intimate connection with the computer; it knew what had been done to it but was helpless to do anything about it. Natasha watched Erik make small, careful changes to the control panel on one side of the cube and turned up her aristocratic nose.

“Even by your standards, that is a seriously ugly object. Are you sure this . . . thing, will do what it’s supposed to?”

“Of course,” said Erik, bristling at the implied slight on his abilities. “The computer augments the cat’s natural psychic abilities, and together they can See and Hear whatever is going on for miles in every direction. They can even peek a short way into the Past and the Future. Theoretically. Ignore the spitting and the hissing and the occasional squalling; the cat’s head will do what I want, when I want it to. I plugged a wire directly into its little catty pleasure/pain centre, and a few volts can give it unbearable pain or incredible pleasure. I am its god. Though I still can’t get it to purr for me.” He leered at Natasha. “Think of it: absolute pleasure, at the touch of a button. I could perform a similar operation on you if you wanted. If you asked me nicely.”

“And leave the button in your hands?” said Natasha. “I think not. Ask your cat what’s happening down in the tunnels.”

Erik reached for the control panel, then had to snatch his hand back again as the cat head tried to bite it. He giggled happily, tried again, and made a few small adjustments. The blazing mechanisms jumped and danced, pieces of solid light interacting on many levels, moving irrevocably towards one terrible configuration. The cat head howled, a long, rising sound that continued long after lungs would have given out. And then the cat’s jaws snapped together, its whiskers twitched, and its eyes locked on to something only they could see. The cat head spoke, but there was nothing human in its harsh yowling voice.

“Something new has come to Oxford Circus,” it said. “Or something very old. Something from the afterworlds has manifested in the tunnels, deep down in the dark. And it’s not alone, down there. Its mere presence is enough to stir up ghosts and demons and monsters. The darkness is alive. And it’s hungry.”

Erik looked at Natasha. “See? I told you!”

“Shut up. We already knew there was a powerful force loose in the station.”

“Still, something from the afterworlds, made flesh and therefore vulnerable . . .” Erik rubbed his hands gleefully. “Now that’s a prize worth having.”

“It’s cold, and it burns,” said the cat head. “It’s wild and fierce and free, and it will kill you.”

“You wish,” said Erik absently, and turned off the cube. The cat’s head fell silent, but its unblinking eyes still burned with hate.

“I’m hungry,” said Natasha.

“Eat your chicken legs,” said Erik.

“Hungry for ghosts,” said Natasha. “There’s nothing quite like them, nothing so . . . satisfying. I might even leave a few for you, this time.”

“You know I don’t indulge,” Erik said primly. “Nasty habit, and dangerous to your mental health. If you ever had any.”

“Prude,” said Natasha. “Scaredy-cat.”

Erik sniffed loudly but wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I value the integrity of my mind far too much to risk contaminating it with inferior thoughts and memories.” He gave in to curiosity and looked almost defiantly at Natasha. “I simply do not see what you people get out of it. Don’t you ever get . . . confused, with other people’s memories and identities suddenly crashing about inside your head?”

“Darling,” said Natasha, “that’s the good part. That’s the rush. That’s what makes them so very
tasty
.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“I know you are, but what am I?”

And then they broke off and looked around sharply, as every ticket machine in the lobby suddenly spat up all the coins it had taken. Pound coins and assorted change jumped and clattered across the floor as they were ejected with force, bouncing and rolling everywhere, shining and shimmering in the over-bright light. Some of them rolled right up to Erik’s feet, and he reached down to grab a handful; but Natasha stopped him with a harsh command. One by one the machines ran out of money and fell silent. Coins lay scattered all over the floor. Natasha watched the ticket machines carefully for a while, to see if they’d do anything else, but they remained still and silent. She turned her back on them and the money with studied insolence and returned to the top of the escalator. Erik carefully packed his cat-head computer back into its pack, then casually scooped up a handy two-pound coin. Only to yell and throw it away again.

“Hot!” he said. “Hot hot hot!”

“Did it burn you?” said Natasha, not looking around.

“Yes!”

“Good.”

Erik scowled. “Damned thing was hot enough to have been coughed up from Hell itself. What was that for?”

“Someone is playing games with us,” said Natasha.

“Could it be JC and his people?” said Erik, immediately forgetting the pain in his fingertips. “Could they know we’re here?”

“No,” said Natasha. “I’d know . . . if they knew. I think this is something else . . .”

She left the elevators, made her way back through the open ticket barriers, and strolled unhurriedly around the entrance lobby, frowning as she forced her telepathy into every psychic nook and cranny. Her gaze shot suddenly to one side, and she advanced remorselessly on one corner. And then she stopped as Erik hissed her name, and a ragged man appeared suddenly in the lobby with them. He shuffled slowly around, ignoring the coins on the floor as though they weren’t there, and perhaps for him they weren’t. He looked like one of the homeless, tall but stooped, a ragged man in ragged clothes, wrapped up in a long coat stained with damp and mould. He had long, matted hair and a filthy beard, and his eyes were dull, preoccupied with cold and hunger and memories that wouldn’t go away. He slowly made a full circle of the lobby, shuffling right past Natasha and Erik without even seeing them. Until, slowly, he seemed to become aware that he was not alone. His head came up, and his dull eyes fixed on Natasha. He didn’t seem at all surprised to see her, or even to care that much. He held out one filthy hand, mutely asking for money.

“He’s not real,” said Erik. “He’s a ghost.”

“Thank you, I had worked that out for myself,” said Natasha.

“Is he aware?” said Erik, professionally interested. “Or is this only a stone tape, a psychic recording?”

“Oh no,” said Natasha. “There’s still some of him here. I can pick up some of his thoughts, rattling around inside his head. He had a name once, and a family and a job; but he lost them all. He ended up on the streets, begging for small change, but he was never very good at it. He died here, in that corner, locked in overnight and overlooked by everyone. Would you like to know his name?”

“No,” said Erik. “It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t matter. This is a simple haunting, stirred up by our presence, or perhaps the workings of my little computer. He isn’t what we’re here for.”

“Hush,” said Natasha. “I told you I was hungry.”

She advanced slowly on the homeless ghost, which stood there, staring at her dully like an animal that had been beaten into submission. It wasn’t until she was right before him that he seemed to become aware of the danger he was in. He looked at Natasha with growing horror but couldn’t seem to move. Natasha licked her lips.

“You don’t even know you’re dead, do you? How . . . delicious.”

She locked his gaze with hers, reaching out with her mind, forcing him to see her clearly through sheer force of will. The ghost’s face twisted with horror, and he began to howl, a wordless scream of helpless dread. The cry of someone who knows no-one will come to save him. The ghost could see Natasha for what she was; and it terrified him. He drifted slowly backwards, not even moving his feet, and Natasha went after him. She stalked him all around the lobby, for the fun of it.

Until, finally, she lunged forward and locked her mouth on his, blocking off his howl. Living lips clamped down on a dead mouth, and he hung helpless before her as she sucked him dry, eating up every last trace of energy and consciousness that remained to him, and savouring it all. Bit by bit he faded away, becoming increasingly insubstantial as there was less and less of him, until not even a trace of the ghost remained. Natasha straightened up, licked her lips slowly, and laughed almost drunkenly. She looked sideways at Erik, backed up against the far wall, and sniggered at him.

“You don’t know what you’re missing, little man. You must learn to develop a taste for the good things in life. Ooh . . . I’m Daddy’s bad little girl . . . Such a little terror. Are you excited, Erik? Did that turn you on? It did, didn’t it? You’d love me to do that to you, wouldn’t you, Erik? And maybe one day, I will. But I guarantee you won’t like it one little bit.”

“If we’re not alone down here,” said JC, “it’s got to be field agents from the Crowley Project. Has to be. There aren’t many people brave enough or crazy enough to go chasing after ghosts in the dark heart of a Code One Haunting unless they expected to get something out of it. Project agents would brave the fires of Hell itself to snatch away a single burning coal if they thought there was money or power or one-upmanship in it.”

Typically, Melody didn’t want to believe it.

“It could be commuters, travellers, left over from this morning,” she said. “Couldn’t it? Trapped down here and overlooked when the station was sealed off by our security people?”

“No,” said JC as kindly as he could. “I read all the reports; security were very thorough. They checked every corridor, every platform, all the maintenance ducts and crawl spaces . . . They brought out the living and carried out the dead; no-one was left behind.”

“What about the people trapped and carried off in the hell trains?” said Happy. “Some of them might have escaped.”

“Those were downbound trains,” said JC. “All the way down. I don’t think we’ll be seeing any of those people again.”

None of them said anything for a while after that. None of them liked to admit there were some things even trained Institute field agents couldn’t put right. One of Melody’s instrument panels began chiming urgently, and she leaned forward to check its monitor screen.

“Hold everything,” she said. “Long-range sensors are picking up something interesting . . . Someone is using very powerful and very nasty technology not far from here. These readings are . . . Damn. I’m getting definite traces of biotech—cutting-edge science with fully integrated organic components. Cybernetics’ dark and unnatural cousin. Strictly illegal, banned in every civilised country and a few that aren’t.”

“Are you sure?” said JC. “I don’t know anyone who’s actually encountered Frankenstein tech in the field before.”

“I’m telling you!” said Melody. “It’s here . . . and it’s operating. My machines can hear it screaming. If these readings are right, it’s screaming all the time. JC, we have to do something about this!”

“We will,” said JC. “Could this be Crowley Project tech?”

“Has to be,” said Melody. “They’re the only bastards hard-hearted enough to use it.”

“I want a gun,” Happy said immediately. “A really big gun. I want a fully functioning Death Star gun.”

“Not even if Godzilla himself were to show up,” said JC.

“Well, how about a big stick with a nail in it, to wave at them, then?”

“Brace up, man,” said JC. “Odds are they’ll be eaten alive by whatever’s down here long before they can cause us any trouble.”

“Strangely, I don’t find that at all comforting,” said Happy.