Ghost of a Chance

TWO THE SCARIEST PLACE ON EARTH

Buckingham Palace is a big place, with a lot of rooms. State-rooms, living-rooms, exhibition rooms. Room for everyone and everything; including a few very specialised institutions that shouldn’t need to exist but unfortunately do. Tucked away behind locked doors and closed-off corridors, the Carnacki Institute has been based in Buck House for many years, under many names. It has always been a Royal Prerogative, rather than a government department, because ghosts are far too important to be entrusted to the whims of transitory politicians. Hell, most of them don’t even know the Carnacki Institute exists. Her Majesty the Queen decides whether or not to tell each new Prime Minister, as they come to office. Some cope better than others. No-one ever talks about the Missing Prime Minister of 1888, whose entire existence had to be removed from the history books.

The Carnacki Institute takes its responsibilities very seriously, and sometimes, entirely ruthlessly. It comes with the job.

The Institute was first convened in 1587, the result of a Royal Charter from Queen Elizabeth I. Consequently, all operatives are answerable only to the head of the Institute and the reigning monarch. Either of whom can order any operative killed at any time. This ensures security, honesty, and integrity, and helps motivate everyone to do the very best.

The Carnacki Institute is a job for life, however long that might be.

JC, Happy, and Melody waited unhappily in a small room at the back of Buckingham Palace, at the end of a corridor that doesn’t officially exist. They’d barely stepped off the train back from the West Country, exhausted and hollow-eyed and running on fumes, when all their mobile phones went off at once, summoning them to Buck House to meet with the Boss of the Carnacki Institute. Passing travellers were briefly disturbed by a flurry of foul language, not a little brandishing of fists, and a few bitter tears. Normally, it was understood that field agents were entitled to at least a month’s downtime between missions, to prevent them burning out. To be called back in this abruptly meant something seriously bad was in the wind.

Either a new and very urgent case . . . or the Boss had finally found out what the three of them got up to between cases, and they were all in real trouble. The Boss tended to take a very dim view of those necessarily private pleasures and distractions that made a field agent’s life bearable; so the agents went to great pains to make sure she never found out about them. They didn’t want to worry her. JC and Happy and Melody made their way across London in silence, really hoping it was merely a dangerous new mission.

And now here they were, sitting in the outer office, waiting to be called in to what people in the know considered the scariest place on earth.

Like most of Buckingham Palace, the Boss’s outer office was always kept that little bit warmer than it really needed to be; and the recirculated air in that small, windowless room was giving JC a headache and a seriously dry mouth. It was either that or the stark terror. JC had learned to deal with ghosts and revenants and demons; but the Boss was another matter. He looked around the office, hoping for something interesting to take his mind off the horrors to come, but there really wasn’t much to look at. Only a brutally efficient desk for the Boss’s secretary, typing happily away as though she didn’t have a care in the world, the heartless cow, and a half a dozen visitors’ chairs of such blatant discomfort that they had to have been designed that way to keep the visitors in a properly respectful frame of mind.

There were the portraits on the walls. Dozens of them, covering all four walls, no room even for a clock or a calendar. Portraits of past field agents who had covered themselves with glory, if not renown. Only the Institute knew what its agents did to protect Humanity from the Outer Forces, and it didn’t even tell itself unless it needed to know. Officially, these portraits were always referred to as the Honoured Members. Field agents more usually referred to them as the Honoured Dead because no field agent ever expected to die of old age. Most didn’t even make it to their midlife crises.

The oldest portraits on the walls were only that—paintings in various styles from various periods, often by artists with famous names and reputations. Which is why there are unexplained gaps in certain artists’ careers. The clothes in the portraits changed with the passing fashions, but the faces all had the same look. Hard-used, heroic, haunted. Unsmiling faces, with eyes that had seen things they could never forget. After the paintings came photographs, from the first daguerreotypes to sepia prints, to the sharp digital images of today. Men and women who had gone down into Hell and kicked arse, for no other reward than knowing it was a job that needed doing. No medals, no honours, and sometimes not even a body for the funeral. The job was its own reward.

The faces in the portraits were different every time JC was summoned to the outer office. He didn’t know who was in charge of rotating them, or even if there was any significance in the choices. He half suspected the portraits chose their own positions.

JC sat easily on his stiff-backed chair, his cream suit immaculate as always, and did his best to project an air of unconcerned nonchalance. With a touch of insolence. Never let your enemies think they’ve got you worried. And, having searched his conscience all across London, although the prospect of meeting the Boss in person frankly unnerved him, as it did everyone . . . he really wasn’t that worried. He hadn’t done anything too terrible, recently, and he was confident in his ability to talk his way out of any lesser charges.

Happy, on the other hand, was not looking at all well. He sat bolt upright on his inflexible chair, looking guilty and put-upon in equal measure. His hands were clasped tightly together in his lap, to keep them from trembling too obviously, sweat beaded on his high forehead, and he’d developed a small but definite twitch in one eye. At least he hadn’t started whimpering yet. Typical of Happy; always convinced that the Universe was out to get him. Of course, in this job, sometimes it was. Or the Boss; which was just as bad.

The seriously heavy-duty wards preventing him from using his telepathic abilities probably weren’t helping. Happy always described the experience as enduring the hangover without having first enjoyed the drunk.

Melody was playing the latest version of Doom on her phone and giving it her entire concentration; apparently completely impervious to the demands and dangers of the everyday world. Melody really didn’t care much about the ordinary world, except when it interfered with her personal needs and interests. And she was never happier than when she had a new toy to play with. Only someone who knew her really well would have detected the sullen anger coiled and waiting in her tense muscles. Melody’s first impulse was always to fight. With her tech, her knowledge, or a really big gun. She always played to win, or at the very least to go down with her teeth buried in an enemy’s throat.

Happy cracked first. He turned abruptly in his seat and glared at JC. “This is all your fault!”

“Really?” said JC. He made a point of relaxing even further in his chair, so that he seemed positively boneless. “And how, pray, is this my fault? Considering that we haven’t even been told what we’ve been called in for yet.”

“Because it always is your fault!” said Happy.

“He has a point,” said Melody, not looking up from her computer game. “Always first through the doors, always first into the thick of things, and dragging us along behind you. With us usually yelling Can we please talk about this first? Remember Harroby Hall?”

“I thought we’d all agreed that the Harroby Hall situation was not my fault,” said JC, with quiet dignity. “Neither of you noticed anything out of the usual either. How were we supposed to know the house was the haunting, and not the people? That the extremely unfortunate Price family were in fact living in the ghost of a house that had burned down thirty years before? It’s not as if any of your precious instruments detected anything, did they, Melody dear? Still, since we’re so happily reminiscing, perhaps we could share some precious memories of the Case of the Glasgow Bogle? When you assured me that the Bogle was, in fact, entirely harmless? Hmm?”

“Well it was,” Melody muttered defensively. “Right up until Happy provoked it.”

“Oh right, blame me!” said Happy. “Why do I always get the blame?”

“Because you deserve it,” snapped Melody, crushingly. “Remember the Phantom Bugler of Warwick-on-Sea?”

Happy sniffed, stuck out his lower lip sulkily, and wouldn’t meet her eyes. “How was I supposed to know it wasn’t a bugle? I’ve led a very sheltered life. Or at least, I did, right up until I got drafted into this bloody organisation. I can feel one of my heads coming on.”

“Children, children,” murmured JC. “Let us not discuss our personal failings while the enemy is listening.”

They all looked across at the Boss’s secretary, Heather. She smiled sweetly upon them without slowing her typing for a moment. Heather (if she had a last name no-one knew it, for all sorts of security reasons) was the perfect secretary. Knew everything, said nothing; or at least, nothing that mattered. Calm, professional, and pleasantly pretty, in a blonde curly-haired round-faced sort of way, Heather dressed neatly rather than fashionably; and as the Boss’s last line of defence, she was probably the most-heavily-armed person in Buck House. Supposedly, Heather was equipped to take down a whole army of terrorists, if necessary, and certainly no-one felt like testing the rumour. You had to get past Heather to get to the Boss, and unless you had exactly the right kind of paperwork, signed and countersigned in all the right places, that wasn’t going to happen. JC once saw Heather kick an overpresumptuous Parliamentary UnderSecretary so hard in the balls that half the faces in the portraits winced.

That JC was still prepared to try to charm and wheedle information out of her showed how nervous he really was.

“Heather, my darling . . . looking ravishing as always, of course; might I inquire . . . ?”

“No, JC, my darling, you might not,” said Heather, kindly but immovably. “The Boss will see you when she is ready to see you and not one moment before. All I can tell you . . . is that the Boss is really not a happy bunny this morning.”

JC raised an eyebrow. “Is she ever?”

“Sorry,” said Heather. “That falls under Classified Information.”

“Come on, Heather,” said Happy, giving his best shot at an ingratiating smile. “Can’t you at least tell us what we’ve done wrong this time? I mean, how deep in it are we?”

Heather smiled sweetly at him. “Do you possess a pair of waders? Or perhaps scuba gear?”

“Situation normal, then,” said Melody, going back to her game.

“Oh God,” said Happy, burying his face in his hands.

“Told you not to shoot that albatross,” said JC. “Now brace up, man. We’ve been here before and made it out the other side. If we were in serious trouble, Heather would have shot us the moment we walked through the door.”

“You might think that;” Heather murmured, “I couldn’t possibly comment.”

Happy moaned briefly, then produced half a dozen bottles of pills from various pockets. He rolled them back and forth in his hands, considering the multi-coloured contents, and squinting at the handwritten labels.

“Now . . . These yellow ones are to remind me to take these red ones . . . And the blue ones are only for use in cases of possession. These stripey ones are for radiation exposure, the hundreds and thousands are for my mood swings, and these chequered ones . . . are to give me a better outlook on life.”

“Trust me, those aren’t working,” said Melody. She glared at him sharply. “I thought we were weaning you off those things. So many pills can’t be good for you. It’s a wonder to me you don’t rattle when you cough.”

“I need a little something, now and again, to help keep me stable,” Happy said defensively. “I’ve got to do something to keep the voices quiet.”

Melody sniffed loudly. “If this is stable, I’d hate to see you when you weren’t. Forget stable, Happy, that horse bolted long ago. Why not settle for coherent?”

“You’re being mean now,” said Happy. “I wonder what these violet ones are for . . . ?”

“You have no idea what half that stuff will do to you, in the long term,” insisted Melody. “Have you even considered the side effects, or the cumulative effects?”

“I read all the little leaflets that come with the pills, very thoroughly,” said Happy.

“Yeah,” said JC. “Looking for loopholes.”

Happy knocked back a yellow and two reds. JC took a purple, just to keep him company.

The intercom on Heather’s desk buzzed officiously. Heather stopped typing to listen to something only she could hear, then nodded briskly to JC, Happy, and Melody.

“In you go, 007, 8, and 9. The Boss is ready to see you now.”

“How come no-one ever asks if we’re ready to see her?” growled Happy. He hiccuped, then smiled suddenly. “Oooh . . . They’re kicking in fast today . . .”

JC and Melody took a firm hold on his arms and headed him towards the heavily reinforced steel door that led to the Boss.

The current Boss of the Carnacki Institute was Catherine Latimer. She sat commandingly behind her Hepplewhite desk, while the three field agents arranged themselves untidily before her. She gestured sharply at the three chairs set out in front of the desk, and the trio immediately sat down, like school pupils called before their headmistress, for crimes not yet made clear. JC and Melody did their best to look contrite; Happy didn’t have the knack.

Catherine Latimer had to be in her late seventies but was still almost unnaturally strong and vital. Medium height, stocky, grey hair cropped short in a bowl cut, her face was all hard edges and cold eyes. She wore a smartly tailored grey suit, without a flash of colour anywhere, and smoked black Turkish cigarettes in a long, ivory holder; an affectation from her student days in Cam-bridge. (There were long-standing rumours that she’d made some kind of Deal with Someone, in her college days, but no-one had ever been able to prove anything.)

Every day she sent agents out on missions that could lead to their deaths, or worse. If it bothered her, she hid it really well. But every agent knew that if they fell in the field, she would move heaven and earth to avenge them.

JC always thought of her as the last of the Bulldog Breed. But only to himself, and never in her presence. He didn’t think she could actually read minds, but he didn’t feel like taking the chance.

Rather than meet the Boss’s unnerving gaze directly, JC looked around her office. It was not without interest. The Boss had been a field agent herself, back in the day, and she still kept souvenirs of that time around to brighten up her otherwise-coldly-efficient office. So, apart from the expected shelves crammed with books and files, and the necessary modern technology, there was also a large goldfish bowl, half-full of murky ectoplasm, in which the ghost of a goldfish swam calmly back and forth, flickering on and off like a faulty light bulb. An old Victrola wind-up gramophone, complete with curving brass horn, waited patiently in one corner. It played the memories of old 78 rpm recordings that didn’t physically exist any more. JC had once heard it play a 1908 recording of the last English castrato, David Tennich. A beautiful, eerie, subtly inhuman sound. The Haunted Glove of Haversham, which had strangled seventeen young women in 1953, until the Boss figured out what was going on, and captured it, now resided under a glass display case. Very firmly nailed to its wooden stand, just in case. It looked like a very ordinary glove.

And, finally, there was a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen, taking pride of place behind the Boss’s desk. The whole face seemed to follow you around the room.

Having run out of excuses not to meet the Boss’s gaze, JC decided to get his retaliation in first. He arranged his crossed legs so casually it was practically an insult, leaned back in his chair, and looked down his long nose at the Boss.

“What is so important that we had to be summoned here, like peasants to the Great Hall, so soon after our last case?” he demanded. “We are entitled to sufficient downtime between cases. It would say so in our contracts if we were allowed contracts, which we aren’t, and is another matter I’d like to discuss. Hold everything; don’t tell me one of the Royal corgis has got possessed again . . . I keep telling you, they’re too inbred these days. The corgis, not the . . . Look; we do all have lives, you know, outside the Institute . . .”

“I know all about your lives,” said the Boss, in her usual calm, thoughtful tone. “I know everything there is to know about you and your team, Mr. Chance. Including all the things you think I don’t know. You, for example, run a bookshop in Charing Cross Road; ostensibly antiquarian, but actually specialising in rare and dangerous volumes of forgotten lore, forbidden knowledge, and forsaken arts. The erudite scholar’s equivalent of the back-pack nuke. Merely opening some of those books was enough to set off alarms in organisations like this all over the world.

“You recently acquired a folio copy of that damned and utterly poisonous play The King in Yellow. Reading it is enough to drive most men mad. On its one and only performance in Paris in 1898, the audience stormed the stage and killed and ate the entire cast. And I am here to tell you that those specially enchanted blast goggles you purchased on eBay will not be enough to protect you if you try to read it.”

She switched her thoughtful gaze to Happy, who jumped in his chair and giggled nervously.

“You, Mr. Palmer, are an accountant. Because there’s always good money in accounting, and because you find numbers soothing. You can make numbers make sense, unlike people. You work for us because I know what else you do with numbers . . . And as long as you continue to work for us, no-one else will ever have to know.”

She turned to Melody, who glared right back at her. Melody was only ever impressed by technology.

“Miss Chambers, I believe you like to say you’re Something in Publishing. In fact, you publish specialised erotica for the fetish community. Some of it so specialised I’m frankly hard-pressed to see where the erotica comes in.”

“People have always liked to play dress-up,” said Melody. “I just take it a bit further than most.”

“How shall I love thee, let me count the ways,” murmured JC. “I should come here more often; I learn the most intriguing things . . .”

“For once, the three of you are not here to be judged on your many and various misdeeds,” said the Boss. She stopped to fit a new cigarette into her holder and lit it with a monogrammed gold Zippo. “Annoying though they frequently are. I have told you before, Mr. Chance; travel expenses do not extend to first class.”

“Only way to get a little peace and quiet, these days,” said JC.

The Boss glared at Happy. “Nor am I happy with your continuing demands for new medications. When you finally die, we’ll have to bury you in a coffin with a child-proof lid.”

Happy sniffed. “I only stay with the Institute for the free prescriptions and access to unstable chemicals. I am a medical miracle. Universities have been bidding against each other for years, for the rights to my body for scientific research. Some don’t even want to wait till I’m dead.”

“And I’m only here for the tech,” Melody said firmly. “Can’t do the job without the right equipment.”

The Boss’s nostrils flared slightly. “You just like to play with the latest toys. And break them.”

JC realised, with something like wonder, that the Boss was only saying these things in order to avoid saying something else. She was distracting herself with familiar complaints so she could put off having to tell them about the new case. Which meant it had to be something really bad . . . He watched, impressed despite himself, as the Boss squared her shoulders and got down to business.

“All of this . . . is irrelevant. You are not here to receive the various dressing downs you so thoroughly deserve; you are here because the Institute is faced with a major emergency. Something bad has happened, down in the London Underground. Oxford Circus Tube Station is haunted. A Code One Haunting.”

JC sat up sharply. “A Code One, right here in the heart of London? That’s supposed to be impossible! The whole city’s covered with overlapping layers of pacts and protections, laid down ever since Roman times.”

“The unprecedented nature of the haunting is what makes this such an emergency,” said the Boss. “If what we suspect is true, all hell is about to break loose in the Underground.”

“What’s happened?” said JC. “Tell us everything.”

“It started slowly, sneaking in around the edges, almost unnoticed,” said the Boss, leaning back in her chair and watching the shapes her cigarette smoke made in the air. “Stories of odd-looking people on overcrowded platforms, who never seemed to get on any train. Uneasy presences, felt rather than seen, on deserted platforms late at night. Lights that flickered on and off, or changed in intensity, for no reason anyone could explain. Strange announcements, by unauthorised voices, saying awful, disturbing things. People travelling up the escalators who never arrived at the top. Horrid laughter in the tunnels, and never anybody there.

“Then things got worse in a hurry. Indistinct figures were seen throwing themselves in front of approaching trains; but after each train had been stopped and the tracks inspected, no body was ever found. Men and women claimed to have been pushed violently from behind, just as a train was coming in, but when they turned and looked, no-one was anywhere near them. More and more travellers were reported missing—seen going down into the Underground system, then never heard from again.

“And people came and went . . . who didn’t look entirely like people.

“It all came to a head at Oxford Circus Station, at eight thirty-five this morning. We’ve had to stop all the trains going in and out and shut the whole place down; no-one in or out, until further notice. I have a few witness statements, recordings, for you to take a look at. No comments, please, until you’ve seen them all.”

She spun her desk-computer screen around so they could all see it and stabbed at her keyboard with two fingers, her cigarette-holder jutting grimly from one corner of her mouth. The first witness was a man in his late forties, neat City suit, respectable. You’d have believed anything he said in a court of law. But his face was grey and shocked, and his mouth was slack, as though he’d just been hit. His eyes were frightened, desperate.

“Trains were running when none were scheduled,” he said, in a voice that sounded on the edge of tears. “Bad trains. They didn’t stop, only slowed down as they passed by, so everyone on the platform could get a good look. Strange trains with strange markings, in the kinds of writing you see in dreams. The metal of the cars steamed, blazing with unbearable heat, and inside . . . there were things, terrible things . . . awful shapes, not human . . . beating fiercely against the closed doors and windows, fighting to get out, to get at everyone waiting on the platform. We all screamed. Some turned and ran. The things in the cars laughed at us and beat on the windows with their fists. They would have killed us all if they could. I won’t go back into the Underground again. It’s not ours any more.”

The next witness was a woman in her mid thirties. Her face was calm and relaxed, and her voice was quite steady, and entirely reasonable. But blood had dried all down one side of her face from where she’d yanked out a chunk of her own hair. She played with the bloody mess while she talked.

“I was on the northbound platform when the train came in. It was pretending to be an ordinary train, but it wasn’t. There were people trapped inside. As the cars rolled to a halt, we could see men and women, screaming soundlessly, as they tried desperately to escape; but the cars wouldn’t let them out. Some of us tried to help, but the doors wouldn’t budge. Up close, we could see the bloody trails left on the windows by broken fingers and torn-away nails. The train moved off again and took them all away. And I know . . . it would have taken us, too, if it could. It wanted to, but it was already full. That downbound train, bearing them off to Hell . . .”

The third witness was a child. Maybe eight or nine years old, in a pretty party dress. She laughed at the camera, but it was an adult’s laugh, not a child’s. And all she would say was Look who’s come to see you! over and over again.

The Boss turned off her screen and fixed the three field agents with a steady stare. “So far, we’ve studied three hundred and seventeen witness statements. Those were the most . . . representative. We’ve had to section many of them under the Mental Health Act, for everyone’s safety. Hopefully, we’ll be able to do something for them once this nasty business has been dealt with. For the moment, the official version is that the Underground has been the subject of a terrorist attack, involving a new nerve gas that induces nightmare hallucinations. That should keep the press out, for a while. Understand me; this has to be cleared up fast.”

“And that’s why you called us in,” JC said happily. “Because we’re the best you’ve got.”

“No,” said the Boss. “You’re just the best available. Everyone else is busy, or too far away to be called in quickly enough. So you get the case. Don’t drop the ball on this one, people, or I will have yours off with a blunt spoon. I want this dealt with, whatever it takes.”

“You always do,” said JC. “Do we get any backup?”

“No,” said the Boss. “Too risky. You’re on your own.”

“Oh joy,” said Happy.

“Deep joy,” said JC.

“Happy happy joy joy,” said Melody, unexpectedly.

“Get out,” said the Boss. “Shut this down hard, and fast, and all your many sins will be forgiven, if not forgotten. And try not to get yourselves killed. It’s expensive replacing good field agents.”

“Would this be a good time to talk about a raise?” said Happy.