Ghost of a Smile (15 page)

“Who is it, Happy?” JC said quietly. “Who is it that's coming?”

“The Doctors,” said Happy. “Slaughtered and butchered here by their own creations, driven insane just by being here when it happened.”

“Are you saying that simply being around these New People is enough to drive humans crazy?” said Melody.

“They're too much for us,” said Happy, dreamily. “We can't cope. Witnessing the change was enough to blow all the Doctors' fuses. That's what we've got here—the flotsam and jetsam of a radical experiment, the fall-out and debris from the creation of a new thing. Mad Doctor ghosts, riding the coat-tails of the New People, soaking up the energies released to maintain their insane existence after death.”

“Happy?” said JC. “Happy, can you hear me? You've gone too far; you need to come back to us.”

“I see you,” said Happy, staring down the long laboratory at something only he could see. “I see you . . .”

Melody stepped in front of him, blocking his view. She raised both hands to cup his face tenderly, meeting his gaze with her own.

“Come back to us, Happy. Come back to me. Don't leave me here alone, in the light.”

His eyes snapped back into focus, and he smiled at her. “I never knew your voice could reach so far. All right, I'm back. I don't like it, but I'm back. What's happening, and is it too late to head for the exit?”

“The Doctor . . . is in,” said a voice, seeming to float down the long, open floor towards them. A foul, desiccated voice, dripping with ill will.

The whole floor was changing. The very structure and constituents of the long laboratory became warped and twisted, wrenched out of shape by unnatural forces. Advance harbingers of the Mad Doctor ghosts, altering the world into something more to their liking, something more able to support their awful existence. Making the world over into a reflection of their own insane needs and wishes. Solid surfaces slumped, flowing and re-forming. Metal ran away in lumpy streams, like melting wax, while scientific equipment heaved and turned, taking on new shapes and meanings. The walls bowed slowly inwards, and the ceiling drooped. The light intensified, becoming painfully bright—perhaps because the Mad Doctors wanted what was happening to be clearly seen, and appreciated. Or perhaps to make the hunting easier.

The computer Melody had been working on swelled up suddenly. The monitor screen burst stickily and vomited its contents onto the floor. The pool spread, as bits of silicon and steel grew legs and scuttled across the floor like maddened insects. All across the laboratory, machines unfolded like blossoming flowers, becoming strange enigmatic things with too many angles. The glass windows all along the far wall disappeared. Where they should have been was
nothing
—an absence in the world, something the eye couldn't even acknowledge.

“Scalpel, scalpel, shining bright, in the horror of the night,” said the voice. “What unnatural hand and eye can undo thy yielding flesh?”

“I am getting serious operating-theatre vibes,” said Happy. “And not in a good way.”

“Look,” said Melody, pointing down the long floor. “The Mad Doctors are here.”

They came scuttling and crawling, around and over and in between the warped and twisted structures that now filled the laboratory. They moved in sudden darts, like white-coated spiders, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on more. Mad Doctors in pristine white gowns and blood-spattered surgical masks, ghostly hands clutching scalpels and bone-saws and sharp steel probes. Their eyes were cool and vicious and full of a terrible, hot insanity. They had left their humanity behind them when they died and become something else, with new thoughts in their twisted minds, and dark foul emotions.

There was no way of telling how many Mad Doctor ghosts there were. They were here and there and everywhere, blinking in and out, never still.

“We can see what's wrong with you,” said the voice. It didn't seem to come from any one ghost in particular. “We can see what's bad in you. We're going to cut it out and play with it, and make it ours. And oh what fun we'll have—while you last.”

“Happy,” JC said quietly. “Are they really there? I mean—
physically
there?”

“Oh yes,” said Happy. “Very, very definitely solid and real . . . These are powerful manifestations, JC. Dead, but not departed. I think . . . they exist in the spaces between spaces, in the odd little gaps and lacunae of reality, hiding like trap-door spiders. Think of them as a by-product of the process that made the New People. Or think of them as aetheric parasites. Remaking the laboratory was them putting on something more comfortable. They want to terrify us. I think they feed on fear.”

“They're still ghosts,” said JC. “And we deal with ghosts.”

“They're predators,” said Kim, her nose wrinkled with disgust. “And they're hungry. I can see them more clearly than you can. They're not human any more. I don't have words for what they've made themselves into, for what they really are. They're insane, JC, and their madness is contagious. It's affecting the world.”

“Can we destroy them?” said JC.

“They're dead,” said Kim. “But not all the way. You might say . . . they're clinging on to existence by their fingernails. Their madness lets them do impossible things, but that very madness is what makes their grip on reality so precarious. Pry them loose, JC.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” said JC, rubbing his hands together in a brisk and hearty fashion.

“But what are we going to
do
?” said Happy. “I don't see our usual bag of tricks working with these ghosts. And those scalpels look really sharp.”

“We'll do what we always do,” JC said grandly. “Experiment, with extreme prejudice.”

“How do I get out of this chicken-shit outfit?” said Happy.

The Mad Doctor ghosts came charging forward. Some ran, some scuttled, some hopped and leapt like white-coated bugs. Some swarmed over the crazily outcropping structures they'd created. Some walked jerkily, in sudden strobelike motions, as though they couldn't be bothered to cross all the space they travelled through but rather jumped from bit to bit. They brandished their cutting tools with horrible glee, laughing the vague but confident laugh of the utterly insane. Their eyes were deep and dark, horrifyingly empty of anything a sane man could hope to understand.

Melody stepped forward and opened fire with her machine pistol. She swept it back and forth with cool precision, raking the ranks of the Mad Doctor ghosts with a steady stream of bullets. But she couldn't seem to hit any of them. Some of the ghosts darted back and forth with inhuman speed, easily avoiding the gunfire. Others simply weren't there when the bullets arrived. And some simply stood and laughed at her as the bullets went straight through them. Bullets ricocheted from warped structures or sank into moist spongy surfaces. The Mad Doctor ghosts laughed their hateful laughs and kept on coming.

JC glanced at Happy. “Even in the midst of all this, I have to ask—where does she keep that gun when she's not using it?”

“I've never dared ask,” said Happy.

“Which part of
they're already dead
did you miss, Melody?” said Kim. “You're not going to take them out with a bullet. You'd have more luck clubbing them over the head with the barrel.”

“Can't blame a girl for trying,” Melody said airily, making her machine pistol disappear again. “I am now officially open to fresh ideas. Preferably very soon because those bastards are getting really close.”

A Mad Doctor ghost appeared out of nowhere, leaping in from the extended blind spot where the windows used to be. He threw himself at Kim and passed straight through her. She cried out, in shock and horror. The Mad Doctor ghost howled and shrieked and jumped up to run about on the ceiling, slashing at the air with his scalpel. JC moved in close beside Kim, half reaching out to hold her.

“Are you all right, Kim?”

“It wasn't only his body that went through me,” said Kim. “It was his mind, too. Or what was left of it. His thoughts don't make sense any more, JC.”

JC nodded quickly, pulled another of his holy-light grenades out of an inner pocket, primed it, and tossed it into the midst of the Mad Doctor ghosts. But it never got there. While it was still in mid air, the ghost standing on the ceiling caught it easily with one hand, then dropped down to squat on a massive steel shape. The Mad Doctor ghost shook its head violently back and forth as it ate the grenade, biting large chunks off it. The bloody surgical mask split like a crimson smile to allow the ghost to chew on the grenade like a toffee apple. Holy light burst out of the grenade in sudden fierce blasts, and the Mad Doctor ghost sucked it all up.

“Close your mouth, JC,” Kim said quietly. “And tell me you've got something else up your sleeve apart from your arm.”

“Of course,” JC said quickly. “It's just that . . . I rather had my hopes set on those grenades.”

“I'm picking up something!” said Happy. “There's someone else on this floor, apart from us and those bloody things! I think someone's running the Mad Doctor ghosts, the same way they ran the shells in the lobby! Someone or something is connecting them, supporting them!”

“I told you they were barely hanging on,” said Kim.

A Mad Doctor ghost slipped and slid across the floor towards them, grinning with malicious intent, moving faster and faster as though gravity and friction were things he didn't need to bother with any more. He brandished a gleaming bone-saw with horrid glee. JC went forward to meet it, and the bone-saw lashed out with supernatural speed. JC only had time to get his arm up to protect his throat, and then the jagged razor-sharp edge slashed through his sleeve and arm. Blood spread quickly across the ice-cream white sleeve. He didn't cry out with pain, only glanced at the stain on his sleeve and roared with rage.

“Look at what you've done to my best suit, you bastard!” JC grabbed the nearest half-melted chair and brought it down on the ghost's head with all his strength. And perhaps because the Mad Doctor ghost had made the things in the laboratory part of its world, the chair smashed the ghost to the ground. JC hit the ghost with the chair again and again, rage fuelling his strength, and the ghost scuttled away across the floor with JC close behind.

Half a dozen Mad Doctor ghosts hit Melody and Happy from every side at once, forcing them apart. Melody spun and danced, punched and kicked, and held the ghosts at bay through sheer ferocity, for a while. Scalpels and bone-saws cut viciously at her from every side, and every cut came that much closer to getting through. Melody's fists and feet shot out with deadly skill and furious energy, but none of it did her any good. Sometimes her hands connected with something like flesh and bone, but more often they glanced stickily from a grinning face or sailed right through. The ghosts were only as solid as they chose to be. They faded in and out, even passing through each other as they crowded round Melody. She began to get the feeling that the fight was only continuing because they liked to see her dance.

Happy made a run for it, first chance he got, and the giggling ghosts chased him in and out of the distorted surroundings, cutting at him with their sharp blades, to keep him moving. Every now and again, a ghost would appear suddenly to block his path, and Happy would hit it with a concentrated blast of telepathic disbelief. The Mad Doctor ghost would burst apart in an explosion of ectoplasmic strings, then pull itself back together as Happy ran on. After a while, he noticed that while the ghosts scrambled around and over the maze of enigmatic structures that filled the whole floor, they never ran through any of it. They had entered the physical world and made it theirs, so now they had to follow at least some of its rules. Happy sprinted down a narrow channel, thinking fiercely, and when he got to the end, he stopped and spun around and gave the following Mad Doctor ghosts the finger. They howled with rage and came leaping and skittering after him. He threw his whole weight against the nearest towering structure and forced it over, to fall on top of the ghosts. The sheer weight slammed them to the floor and held them there, and Happy did his special victory dance—only to stop abruptly in mid step as the ghosts began to slowly ooze up through the heavy weight.

Happy looked quickly around him, then froze in place as he realised the far end of the laboratory floor had disappeared. In its place, strange lights flared and flickered in an off-kilter honeycomb of caves and depressions, held together with shimmering ectoplasmic strands. Thick fluids dripped, lubricants for the cells of the honeycomb as they turned and revolved around each other. As Happy watched, new cells slowly formed at the edge of the honeycomb, forcing their way further into the world. Happy stared at it, studying it with more than his eyes, and knew it for what it was. The world the Mad Doctor ghosts had made for themselves, located in the spaces between spaces, so they could hide like rats in the walls of reality. The ghosts had brought their world with them, and it was making itself at home.

A Mad Doctor ghost appeared suddenly before Happy, and he reacted instinctively by kicking it good and hard in the balls. The ghost dropped its bone-saw and crashed to its knees. Happy kicked it in the head, and it fell over backwards.

“The longer they stay in our world, the more bound by its rules they become,” said Kim, drifting up by the ceiling. “That's what they want—to become real again. They don't know they're dead.”

Happy nodded quickly, and picked up the ghost's bone-saw. It was cold and fragile in his hand at first, hard to get a hold on, but the longer he hung on to it, the heavier and more real it felt. The ghost reared up before Happy, screaming and howling as it reached for its weapon. And Happy cut its head off with one hard blow. The head fell to the floor and shattered slowly, like a smashed egg in slow motion. The headless body drifted apart, like smoke on the wind. The bone-saw disappeared from Happy's hand.