Ghost of a Dream (24 page)

“Kim brought me here…”

“So you keep saying! But I never saw a damned thing! Forget your ghostly girl-friend…Trust a ghost hunter to have a dead girl-friend, which now that I think about it, is decidedly icky…You’ll be telling me you sleep in a coffin next.”

“Never on a first date,” said JC.

“Oh, I feel so much safer now,” said Lissa.

They shared a smile and looked around them. The costumes stared silently back.

“There must be some good reason for us to be here,” JC said stubbornly. “And since the only things here are the costumes…I suppose we should inspect them. Maybe there’ll be a note in a pocket or something…”

He stepped up to the first row, and briskly checked out the clothes, one at a time. Lissa moved reluctantly forward while making it very clear she didn’t want any part of it. She wouldn’t touch anything until she’d watched JC man-handle a whole bunch of them without suffering any ill effects. And then she sighed heavily and pulled out a costume here and there, looking it over carefully and checking the details.

“Good-quality material,” she said, finally. “High-end workmanship. But…”

“But?” said JC. “But what?” He held a Napoleon uniform up against himself, to see how he’d look in it, then reluctantly put it back again.

“But,” Lissa said firmly, “a lot of the details are
wrong
. Mixed periods in the same outfit, wrong kinds of pockets and trimmings, out-of-period materials, important bits and pieces missing…No professional costumier would make mistakes like this. This…is more like someone faking it. Producing costumes good enough to fool the eye but only from a distance. Amateur night. These clothes look like costumes, JC; but they aren’t.”

JC looked across at Lissa. She stepped back from the costumes to look them over, hands on hips, glaring
ferociously. She looked…suspicious, and JC had to wonder why. Nothing else she’d encountered in the theatre had provoked this reaction.

“All these costumes must mean something,” he said, standing back with her so he could study the rows of clothes with a sceptical eye. “They must be important. Or why bring us all this way just to see them?”

“We could always play dress-up,” said Lissa, but JC could tell that her heart wasn’t in it.

“If we assume that Benjamin and Elizabeth didn’t arrange for these costumes to be here…” he said slowly.

“And I think we can assume that,” said Lissa, very firmly.

“Then someone else must have,” said JC, talking right over her. “Which in turn implies that we’re not the only people interested in this theatre. And this haunting. We’re not the only people in this building. Which would explain a lot.”

Lissa glared about her, looking seriously unsettled. “There can’t be anyone else here. There just can’t. I’d know. I’d feel it…” She realised JC was considering her silently and scowled back at him. “I’m very sensitive to my surroundings!”

“A lot of people are,” JC said soothingly. “Or believe they are. But one of the first things you learn in the Ghost Finding business is that you can’t always trust your instincts. Things, and people, aren’t necessarily always what they seem, in a haunting situation. The dead play by their own rules.”

“But what would the dead want with a whole bunch of not-particularly-accurate costumes?” said Lissa, bluntly.

A slow, heavy rustle passed through the ranks of hanging costumes, like a breeze through forest branches. Hanging clothes twitched and shook, singly and in groups. Sleeves bent and twisted, jackets expanded and relaxed as though someone was breathing in them, and trousers bent at the knee, again and again, as though dreaming of running. Everywhere, costumes were heaving and flexing, as though bothered by unquiet thoughts.

“Back away, Lissa,” JC said quietly.

He glanced back and found that Lissa had already backed all the way up to the closed door, unable to tear her gaze away from the slowly moving costumes. There was a new, uneasy feeling in the room, harsh and oppressive: a sharp tension on the air, anticipating bad things to come. JC glared about him. The feeling of being watched was back again, but colder, more intense. As though someone knew something bad was about to happen and meant to enjoy it.

“It’s a trap,” Lissa said tonelessly. “We’ve been lured into a trap.”

“Don’t get twitchy,” said JC. “It’s all gone weird, agreed, but…it’s only a bunch of clothes. There’s no-one else here but us, living or dead. Look at them; they’re…bits of cloth on wire hangers!” He looked back at Lissa, to see how she was taking it, and thought she looked more puzzled than scared. “Come on!” he said, encouragingly. “How much of a threat can clothes be?”

As he was saying that, all the costumes shrugged off their hangers and moved away from the cold, metal racks, standing upright on their own. They stood in silent ranks, empty and uninhabited. The clothing rails were forced to
the very back of the room, pushed back through the ranks of standing clothes, so an army of empty costumes could confront JC and Lissa with nothing to get in their way. No heads rose from the empty collars, no hands emerged from the empty sleeves, and the slack trousers and leggings hovered a few inches above the floor, with no trace of a foot, or even a shoe. Only costume after costume, standing together in row upon row, turning slowly and silently to orientate themselves on JC, with a horrid sense of purpose.

“You had to ask, didn’t you?” said Lissa. “How dangerous can they be? Look at them!”

A subtle frisson of horror ran through JC as he remembered an old childhood terror. Of how discarded clothes can look on a chair at night, or hanging from a door; of how they could seem to come alive…or look very much as though they might. In the dark of a child’s bedroom. As a young child, JC had wondered whether clothes ever felt angry at being worn and used and moved around under someone else’s control. Made to go places and do things and make movements…that they wouldn’t have chosen to, themselves. On their own. And sometimes he’d wondered whether, when the clothes were finally taken off and laid aside and left to their own devices till morning…whether they might not someday rise and take their revenge?

“Lissa,” JC said quietly, not taking his eyes off the rows and rows of silently watching clothes stacked before him. “I think this might be a good time to get the hell out of here.”

“About time!” said Lissa.

She went over to open the door, then stopped and looked at it.

“Who closed the door, JC? I didn’t close the door.”

“Don’t sweat the small shit, Lissa,” said JC. “Let’s get out of here.”

Lissa reached for the door handle, then stopped again as she realised JC wasn’t coming back to join her. “JC, come on! I’m not leaving without you!”

“It’s all right,” said JC. “I know what to do. I’ve been trained to deal with shit like this.”

“Like
this
?” said Lissa.

“Well, maybe not quite like this,” said JC. “I’m thinking this is probably some kind of large-scale poltergeist activity…But either way, I can’t run off and leave this happening. Someone might get hurt.” He squared his shoulders and took a step forward, to confront the standing costumes. “Listen up!” he said loudly. “I am JC Chance, Ghost Finder in good standing. Licenced to kick supernatural arse. What do you want, clothes?”

There was no response. JC wasn’t exactly surprised. There wasn’t anyone in the clothes to answer. But the more he looked at the various costumes, the spookier they seemed. The lack of heads, of faces, was particularly disturbing. How can you hope to negotiate with, or even threaten, something that has no head to listen with? The more he looked, the more he found to unsettle him. The clothes had no eyes; but they could still see him. Still know exactly where he was. Every single outfit was orientated on him. And none of them had any of the bulges,
or fullness, that you’d expect from the bodies that should be inhabiting them. The sleeves were flat, and the legs didn’t bend. These weren’t clothes worn by invisible men; they were clothes, moving under their own impulses. Animated, not inhabited. He couldn’t decide whether that was worse, or not.

He said as much to Lissa, who nodded stiffly. “It’s worse. We’re definitely not alone in this theatre. Someone else is in here with us, doing this.”

She broke off abruptly, as the costumes lurched forward. Row upon row of the things, advancing on JC and Lissa. There was a horrid sense of purpose, of open menace, in their jerky, deliberate movements. Materials rubbed together in a rough susurrus, as though the clothes were whispering to each other. They bustled against each other in their eagerness; but there wasn’t the sound of a single footstep.

“Definitely time to get the hell out of Dodge,” said JC.

He turned his back on the slowly advancing clothes as an act of defiance and hurried over to join Lissa at the door. She was looking blankly at the moving costumes as though hypnotised, as though she couldn’t believe it was happening. JC grabbed the door handle and rattled it hard; but it wouldn’t turn. He stepped back and charged forward, putting his shoulder to the door; but while the heavy wood jumped and rattled loudly in its frame, it wouldn’t open.

“That isn’t going to work!” Lissa said angrily, snapped out of her daze. “The door opened inwards; remember?”

“Now you tell me,” muttered JC, rubbing at his bruised shoulder. “Do you see anything in here we can use to break down the door?”

“No. Nothing. You think maybe that’s deliberate? Because I sure as hell do. I told you this was a trap!”

“Try not to lose it just yet, Lissa,” said JC. “There are still options.” He moved to stand between her and the advancing costumes. “You can’t let this get to you. A lot’s happened since we entered this theatre, but even though some of it was seriously spooky, and even downright disturbing on occasion…there was never a time when we were in any real danger. I’m trained to notice things like that. Somebody has been doing their level best to scare us, but not once in any way that put our lives at risk.”

“I don’t think that’s true any more,” said Lissa. “Things have changed. This feels different. Dangerous.”

“Come on!” said JC. “What can a bunch of old clothes do? Pelt us with mothballs? Beat us to death with their embroidered cuffs?”

He stepped forward again, closing with the clothes, and raised one hand to whip off his sunglasses, to see if he could stop them with the glare from his altered eyes. The costumes rushed forward and threw themselves on JC, ignoring Lissa completely. As though she wasn’t important, as though she wasn’t even there. The clothes hit JC hard, driving him backwards and wrapping themselves around him in layer upon layer, squeezing tight. JC tried to fight them, but there was nothing there to fight. The clothes simply gave when he tried to hit them
and stretched when he tried to rip and tear them. They dropped upon him in wave after wave, closing tighter and tighter around him, pinning his arms to his sides with inhuman strength, like so many constricting snakes.

The clothes whipped JC’s feet out from under him, and he fell backwards. He hit the floor hard, driving all the breath from his body. And once he was down, he couldn’t get up again. The clothes wrapped him up like a mummy, his legs strapped together, his arms helpless at his sides…He fought and struggled, threw all his strength against the enveloping costumes; but they were stronger than he was. Lissa fought desperately to tear the clothes off him, but even though clothing ripped and tore under her hands, she couldn’t do enough damage to tear even one piece of clothing away. The costumes ignored her, piling onto JC in layer after layer, burying him underneath them.

He thrashed around on the floor, throwing his weight this way and that, but it was becoming harder and harder to get his breath as the clothes compressed his chest. And then a single silk shirt dropped down across his face, slapping into place, moulding itself tightly across his features, filling his mouth and nostrils so he couldn’t get any air at all. One last breath was forced out of him; and he couldn’t draw another one in.

The door smashed in as Old Tom, the caretaker, came crashing into the room. Lissa yelled for him to help her, and the two of them ripped the silk shirt away from JC’s face and tore it into ribbons. JC dragged in a great breath
of air, struggling against the clothes again with renewed strength. Lissa and Old Tom attacked the enveloping costumes with their bare hands, ripping and tearing at them; and the clothes collapsed and went limp. Lissa and Old Tom rocked JC back and forth as they pulled the no-longer-resisting costumes away from him, pulling them off him, layer by layer, until JC could finally find the strength and leverage to break free.

He struggled back up onto his feet, tearing at the last few clothes with an almost hysterical strength, desperate to get them off him. When they finally fell away from him and sprawled unmoving on the floor, he kicked at them viciously, breathing hard. And then he was back in control again, himself again, standing still and forcing his breathing back under control. He smiled easily at Lissa and Old Tom as they stood uncertainly before him.

“Well!” JC said brightly. “That was different. Hello again, Old Tom. Where have you been? We couldn’t find you anywhere.”