Ghost of a Dream (25 page)

“Oh, here and there, sir,” said Old Tom, as vaguely diffident as ever. “I was talking to that scientific young lady of yours, in the lobby.”

JC waited, until it was clear he wasn’t going to get any more, then he looked thoughtfully at the distressed clothes lying on the floor. He prodded a few with the tip of his shoe, to be sure; but there was no response.

“You don’t want to go playing with the costumes, sir,” said Old Tom, reproachfully. “You’ll damage them. Clothes like that are expensive.”

“Do you know how they got here?” said JC.

“No, sir,” said Old Tom. “I’m the caretaker; I don’t do
costumes. That’s a whole other department. More than my job’s worth to mess with things that are none of my concern.”

JC had already stopped listening, half-way through the old caretaker’s response. He was thinking. Why would Kim have brought him here, into a trap, to be attacked? This had to be deliberate. Wait until he was separated from Happy and Melody, then bring him to a room with no escape, where his death would be waiting.

“Why would Kim bring me here?” he said, and only realised he’d said it aloud when Lissa snorted loudly.

“What did she say to bring you here?”

“She didn’t say anything,” said JC.

“Then there’s your answer. How do you know it was really your Kim?” said Lissa. “We’ve all seen all kinds of illusions in the theatre, things and people that weren’t what they appeared to be.”

“But like you said, this was different,” said JC. “This wasn’t just scary; someone meant for me to die here.”

“Someone else is here in the theatre with us,” said Lissa. “Someone who isn’t supposed to be here.”

JC nodded brusquely to Old Tom. “Thanks for your help. Have you seen anyone else? Anyone who isn’t authorised to be here?”

“No, sir.”

JC looked at him thoughtfully. “How did you know Lissa and I were in trouble?”

“I didn’t, sir,” said Old Tom. “I was checking out the corridors, looking for you, to pass on a message. And then I heard you two crashing about in here, where
no-one had any business being, and I thought I’d better take a look.”

“A message?” said Lissa. “Who from, exactly?”

“From Mr. Happy, Mr. Benjamin, and Miss Elizabeth,” said the old caretaker, a bit importantly. “They want you, and Miss Melody, to rejoin them on the old stage, as soon as possible.”

“Go back to the main stage?” said JC. “What on earth for?”

Old Tom shrugged. “They didn’t say, sir, and it wasn’t my business to ask. Will there be anything else, sir? Then I’ll be off. Lots of work still to do.”

He smiled about him vaguely and went back out into the corridor. Lissa looked at JC, who stayed where he was, frowning hard, thinking.

“Something’s not quite right,” said JC.

“Oh, I couldn’t agree more,” said Lissa. “That moustache really doesn’t suit him.”

“Why didn’t Melody ring me if she knew I was needed?” said JC. He took out his phone and checked, but there were no missed calls.

“Why didn’t Happy yell at you with his mind?” said Lissa.

“Because I put a lot of time and effort into training him not to do that except for real life-endangering emergencies,” said JC. “Still…”

“Oh, to hell with it,” said Lissa. “Let’s go see what they want. I’m sick to death of this room. Never wanted to come in here anyway.”

JC nodded slowly and started to follow Lissa out of
the room and into the corridor. At the last moment, he stopped in the doorway as a thought struck him. The costumes only attacked him. Not Lissa. Not even when she was tearing at them, to save him. Odd, that…

He looked around the room. There were no clothes, no costumes. Even the clothing racks were gone. He saw only a bare and empty room, full of dust and shadows.

Still in the theatre lobby, and getting more than a little tired of it, Melody frowned over her scientific equipment like a mother with a sick child. She moved back and forth, doing her level best to coax and persuade the various instruments into telling her something she actually wanted to know. But, as far as all her screens, sensors, and scientific readings were concerned, everything in the lobby was wonderful. Nothing out of the ordinary was happening, and all was quiet on the supernatural front. Melody stood over her machines, scowling heavily and tugging at her lower lip as she gave the matter some thought and wondered whether she should get out the operating manual or a really big hammer. Because she knew for a fact that something was wrong with the lobby.

And that was when all her readouts started going crazy, right in front of her eyes. The first to go was the
temperature gauge. The display started climbing, and wouldn’t stop. According to the figure before her, the temperature in the lobby was already at jungle heat and rising so fast it was heading for the stratosphere. If it really was as hot in the lobby as the gauge was making out, the machine would be melting, and Melody would be crisp and aromatic and ready to serve. And then the reading dropped, just as rapidly, and they kept on dropping. Shooting down past normal levels and into sub-zero temperatures that would seriously upset a polar bear. Melody felt a sudden nostalgic twinge for the old-style thermometer, with mercury in it, where if you didn’t like the reading you were getting, you could tap the thing with a fingertip until it changed. You didn’t have that luxury with an electronic readout. She was about to try hitting the thing anyway, on general principles, when the readout rose sharply again, all the way back to normal, and steadied itself.

While Melody was still trying to get her head around what had happened, all her warning alarms went off at once. The sirens were deafeningly loud in the enclosed space of the lobby, and Melody moved quickly from one readout to the next, all of which seemed convinced that she was surrounded and under attack from any number of heavily armed hostiles. The short-range sensors were picking up guns, energy weapons, Objects of Power, and all kinds of dangerous radiations, while the motion trackers showed dozens of hostile presences, circling round and round her instrument station. As far as her defences were concerned, Melody was under attack from
the walking dead, demonic forces, and bloody big aliens in hobnailed boots. The machines were going crazy, warning her about everything under the sun, all of them shouting and screaming for her attention. Melody looked up and glared wildly about her; but the lobby was quite definitely empty and utterly peaceful.

All the alarms shut off at once; and a slow, steady quiet blessedly returned. All the short-range sensor readings were back to normal, indicating everything was as it should be. It was like they’d all suddenly lost their machine minds, for no reason. And then all the long-range sensors kicked in, lights blinking angrily all across the boards. Melody leaned in close to study the readings, and then shook her head numbly. As far as the long-range sensors were concerned, the theatre wasn’t there any more. It was gone, and the rest of the world with it. She couldn’t find a single sensor reporting anything: no physical readings, no energy sources, nothing at all. As though she and her ranks of machines were floating alone, in empty space. Melody looked steadily about her, but the lobby stubbornly insisted it was still there, surrounding her, and everything was fine. She stamped her foot hard on the floor to make sure.

Bright lights were flashing everywhere now, everything kicking off at once; and one by one, the monitor screens turned themselves on, showing Melody images of things that weren’t there. Brief glimpses of other worlds than this. One screen showed the inside of some vast stone temple, from an age before any known history, lit by strange, phosphorescent glows from long creepers
of moss, crawling slowly across the floor and walls, and draping themselves around massive stone carvings of long-forgotten gods with horrid insect faces.

The screen next to it showed a dark, drifting, underwater scene, of some sunken city wrapped in seaweed and studded with pulsing mushroom growths. Strange, unpleasant-looking fish darted this way and that, carrying their own eerie light with them, while huge glass submarines glided past, full of hunched humanoid creatures made out of kelp.

Another screen showed the theatre lobby, soaked and splashed with blood and gore. JC and Happy stared out of the screen, standing together, their clothes and flesh ripped and torn. They were both dead, but they shuffled slowly forward on broken feet, staring out of the screen at Melody with dark bloody holes where their eyes had been, their mutilated faces full of a terrible silent accusation.

The monitor screens all shut down at once, showing nothing. Melody was breathing harshly and scowling so fiercely her face hurt. Either something was wrong with her instruments or something was very wrong with the world. And, since a quick glare around showed the lobby was still there, untouched and unchanged, it had to be her machines. She honestly didn’t know what to do. If she started running major diagnostics on everything, she’d still be here running them when JC and Happy came back to tell her the case was over. Checking them all for outside influences would take hours. Though that had to be what this was. Something from Outside was messing with her. First those nightmare posters on the walls, and now this. Someone was messing with her head, trying to
make her doubt herself, and now they wanted her to doubt her instruments. Melody took a deep breath and shut all her instruments down. Everything. The lights went out, the monitor screens went blank, and every single piece of highly sophisticated technology was suddenly still and silent. Melody hated to do it, but if she couldn’t trust what her equipment was telling her, then it was no damned good at all.

It was all very quiet in the lobby now. The lighting was bright and steady, the shadows blessedly unmoving, and the air was dry and still, as though nothing had happened, and this was just another day. Melody snarled silently at that thought, and rubbed at her aching forehead.
Too much thinking is bad for you,
her mother always said.
It’ll give you lines.
Though her mother never was much of a one for thinking, anyway, or she’d never have married Melody’s father. Bad cess to the man, wherever he might be. Melody made herself concentrate on the matter at hand. Her hands weren’t as steady as they should have been, and her back muscles ached unmercifully from the endless tension. The stress was getting to her; and that wasn’t like her. She never let the world upset her; she made it a matter of principle to always upset the world.

But now she felt very much on her own, without her instruments to lean on. Alone and vulnerable. Melody sniffed loudly. She knew what to do about that. She crouched and reached into the arms cabinet, feeling for the machine-pistol; but her fingers couldn’t find it. She knelt so she could look right into the cabinet, but there was nothing in it. Nothing at all. She stared into the dark
space. She couldn’t believe it. She swept her hand back and forth inside the cabinet, banging it against the inside walls; but every single one of her weapons was gone. She straightened up and moved quickly up and down her instrument racks, checking all the other, more secret, defensive caches she maintained in her set-up; and they were empty, too. All her weapons were gone, including all the ones nobody else was supposed to know about. Including her team-mates.

She slowly turned around in a complete circle, taking in the empty, innocent-seeming lobby. Her back muscles crawled, in anticipation of the attack she probably wouldn’t know anything about until it was too late. Her hands clenched into fists. She could feel cold sweat on her face. And then she caught a glimpse of someone, out of the corner of her eye, watching her. She spun round to look straight at him, but there was no-one there. She caught another glimpse of the watching, smiling stranger, out of the corner of her other eye. She spun around again; and again there was nobody there. She was breathing really hard now, ready to jump on anyone and beat the truth out of them, about what was really going on. She caught another glimpse, and another, from this side and from that, but no matter which way she looked, or how fast she turned, she couldn’t catch him. Only the briefest of glimpses; quick impressions of a man watching her, smiling at her, enjoying her agitation. And every time she saw him, he was that little bit closer, closing in on her. She spun round and round, eyes wide open, then stopped herself with an effort. She stood very still, hands clenched
painfully tight at her sides, fighting to get her frantic breathing and heart rate back under control. She let her head hang down, squeezed her eyes shut, and refused to open them again.

Come on, girl. You can do better than this. You’ve been trained to withstand Outside influences. Trained to keep other people from messing with your mind. So focus! You can do this!

Her breathing slowed, and her thoughts settled. Her back muscles unclenched, and so did her fists. Her mind calmed and cleared, as well-rehearsed mental shields slammed down and locked firmly into place. And when she finally lifted her head again, opened her eyes, and looked around her, the lobby was very definitely empty. Melody sniffed loudly and shook herself roughly, like a dog shaking off a bad dream. She took out her mobile phone. She had to reach Happy and JC, let them know what was happening. Let them know there was someone else in the theatre with them. But there was no signal. Even though she was sure there had been, before. She shook the phone hard, and a voice from the phone said her name.
Melody…
That and nothing more. She checked the phone again, but there still wasn’t any signal. Not a single bar. So where was the voice coming from? The voice from the phone said her name again. A soft, self-satisfied voice, like a purring cat. Like someone used to having the advantage over other people.