Ghost of a Dream

by Simon R. Green

  “Yes,” said Happy, almost absently, all his concentration focused on the tunnel opening. “I can See it, I can Hear it…Like a bright Light, like a great Voice…”

  “The Ghost Caller,” said JC.

  “The Light is shining very brightly now,” said Happy, in a far-away voice. “I don’t like it. That’s not a proper Light. And it’s not a good Voice. It wants to tell me things. Things I don’t want to know…”

  “Is it calling you?” said JC, quickly.

  “No,” said Happy, almost reluctantly. “It doesn’t care about me. I’m just in the way. Its attractions are not for the living. I think both the Light and the Voice are lies, lures…It calls to the dead, to trick them away from the true Light and the true Voice…”

  “Okay,” said JC, surprisingly gently. “That’s enough of that. Come home, Happy. Come back to me, or I’ll have Melody come and bring you back.”

  “I’m back!” said Happy, scowling at JC. “I can look after myself, you know.”

  “Really,” said JC. “You do amaze me. Have we done enough to open the door?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Happy, scowling at the dark tunnel opening. “All I had to do was pry at the edges, and the train did the rest. The train and what’s coming with it. Still not too late to gather up our skirts and run, you know.”

  “We don’t run,” said JC. “We are the Ghost Finders, and we don’t take any shit from the Hereafter.”

  “What’s this we stuff, white man?” said Happy.

  “It’s close!” said Melody, staring raptly at her sensor readings. “And I mean, really close. My instruments are going crazy! In fact, one of them melted…I’m getting really weird energy spikes, other-dimensional radiations…Time and gravity and…and temperature readings that don’t make any sense in our world…Holy crap!”

  She backed rapidly away from her bank of instruments as, one by one, they burst into blue-white flames, then exploded, unable to cope with what they were experiencing. Melody tried to get back, to shut everything down, but the sheer heat drove her away again. She reluctantly abandoned her precious toys and hurried down the platform to join the others. The railway lines down in the valley between the platforms were jumping and juddering, ripping free of the thick weeds that had grown around and over them. The platform vibrated fiercely under the Ghost Finders’ feet. Signs hanging on steel chains swung heavily back and forth. And all the doors in all the buildings slammed open and shut, again and again. Laurie was forced out onto the platform, looking at the tunnel-mouth with wide eyes.

  Until, finally, a great light appeared in the tunnel, blasting out of the tunnel-mouth, red as all the fires of Hell; and out of that unnatural light the steam train appeared at last, thundering out of the old tunnel-mouth. It was huge and dark, with gleaming steel and brass, smoke pumping out of its chimney and its whistle screaming like a soul newly damned to the Pit. Strange-coloured sparks rose where its steel wheels met the rusting rails; and then all the wheels screamed and squealed as the brakes slammed on, and the train and its carriages bucked to a shuddering halt, all along the platform of Bradleigh Halt.

  Come home, at last.

  JC and Happy and Melody stood close together, looking over the steam engine and its seven carriages as they settled to a halt. There was a loud ticking of cooling metal, and great gusts of steam rose on the still, evening air. A thick viscous liquid dripped steadily from every outer surface, bubbling and boiling in reaction to Earth air and Earth conditions. Some alien substance, covering all the train, brought back from the Away place, as though the train had been born again in some strange, alien amniotic fluid. The stuff fell slowly and reluctantly away from the train, dissipating, giving up the ghost, unable to hold itself together in this new kind of world. The whole train smelled like rotting meat, like something that should have been buried long ago.

  The steam still issuing in sudden spurts from the cooling engine smelled bad, too; smelled wrong, unearthly, changed. The few sparks still jumping around the great steel wheels were odd and unnatural colours. The weeds that had choked the railway lines for so long, those that hadn’t been chewed up and thrown aside by the train’s return, now curled up and withered from contact with the great steel wheels.

  JC beckoned urgently to Laurie, and the old man hurried over to join him. He stared at the old steam-engine with fond, almost worshipful eyes.

  “She’s everything my old grand-dad said she was,” said Laurie. “He saw her go into that tunnel, you know, back in the day. He always said she’d find her way home again, eventually.”

  “Are all the carriages there?” asked JC. “Is anything missing? Is everything there that should be?”

  “Oh yes,” said Laurie. “But look at the state of the engine! All that…stuff, dripping off her! It’s a disgrace…What have they done to you, girl? You were a classic!”

  JC looked at Melody. “Any idea where the Ghost Caller might be?”

  “All of my instruments are shot, fried, and dead in the water; but if I had to guess, I’d say probably the baggage-car.”

  “Look at her,” said Laurie, softly and reverently. “Been away so long everything about her has changed. All the metals and alloys are different now…the wood of the carriages is rotting, corrupt. And what’s inside…makes my skin crawl. There’s more to this train than there should be. As though the whole thing’s alive…How can it be alive?”

  “How can you tell all this?” said Happy, staring at him. “I’m a telepath, and I’m not getting half of that!”

  “I can feel it,” said Laurie. “Can’t you?”

  Happy scowled at the train and said nothing.

  “If it is alive, it’s not any kind of life we could hope to understand,” JC said briskly. “Or would want to, probably. Question is—what forms of life might the train have brought back with it?”

  “Really not liking the implications of that,” said Happy. He frowned suddenly, his whole face screwing up. “And I’m picking up something really nasty, now. Not a Light or a Voice this time, a feeling…like sticking your hand into a mess of corruption. It’s the carriages, JC! Look at the carriages…Dear God, what’s happened to the passengers?”

  They all moved slowly down the platform, peering through the distorted glass of the carriage windows they passed. A strange light blazed through the windows, like the blue-green phosphorescence of underwater grottos. People clustered together inside the carriages, staring out at the world they’d come back to; but they didn’t act like people any more. Their eyes were empty, faces twisted with wild, inhuman emotions. Driven mad, every one of them, or perhaps beyond madness into something else, through being trapped for so many years in a place never meant for humankind. They beat and pattered against the closed windows with flat hands as though they’d forgotten what windows were, or what hands were for. They were all desperate to get out, crawling and swarming over each other like oversized beetles, staring out at a world they no longer recognised, with blank, insect eyes.

  “What happened to them?” said Laurie. “What made these people…like this?”

  “The Ghost Caller,” said JC. His voice was flat and harsh, with rigidly suppressed rage. “It’s been active, Calling, all the time it was Away. The passengers in the carriages were all killed, either by the abrupt transition to the Other Place or because they couldn’t survive in the alien conditions they found there. But the Ghost Caller wouldn’t let their spirits depart. Their souls have been trapped in their dead bodies all this time, driven insane by horrors the human mind was never meant to cope with. These are dead bodies possessed by mad ghosts.”

  “How can you know all that?” said Laurie.

  “I seem to feel it,” said JC, a bit dreamily. “Don’t you?”

  “We can’t leave them like this,” said Laurie. “It isn’t right.”

  “Of course we won’t leave them like this,” said JC, immediately all business again. “Helping the restless dead find peace is all part of our job description. But the
only way to free these poor souls is to smash or destroy the Ghost Caller. Then they can pass on to their proper places, in the Hereafter.”

  “Hereafter?” said Laurie. “You mean, Heaven and Hell?”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Happy. “Way above my pay grade. We have enough trouble coping with the Here and Now.”

  “I’m an agnostic,” said Melody. “Mostly in self-defence.”

  “What matters is sending these lost souls on,” JC said firmly. “So they can be made whole and sane again.”

  “I’m more concerned with what happens if the passengers get out of these carriages,” said Happy. “Those windows don’t look particularly strong, or secure.”

  “If they get out?” said JC. “Nothing good, I should imagine. They have enough sense left to know a great wrong has been done them and enough anger to want revenge…”

  “You know,” said Melody, “this would be a really good time for you to produce one of those really powerful and utterly forbidden weapons that you carry about your person, the ones that you’re not supposed to have.”

  “The Boss made me give them all up, after the last case,” said JC. “In fact, she was most insistent about it. Had me strip-searched, and everything. And you really don’t want to know what the ‘and everything’ involved.”

  “She took all your weapons?” said Happy. “And you’re only telling us now?”

  “She’s been keeping a very close eye on me,” said JC. “I’ve had to be very careful. I need the Carnacki Institute’s resources to help me search for Kim.”

  “Look, do you have any nasty weapons about you or not?” said Melody.

  “Not as such,” said JC.

  “I want to go home,” said Happy loudly.

  “Excuse me,” Laurie said firmly. “But I have to ask…is this a real train or a ghost train? I mean, is it really, physically, here?”

  “Good question, Mr. Laurie,” said JC. “To which the official answer is, damned if I know. It certainly seems solid enough…Best to treat it as though it’s real, right up to the point where we decide it’s more useful to treat it as though it isn’t. We are nothing if not flexible in this business, in the face of utter horror.”

  “We have to find the machine,” Melody said stubbornly. “The Ghost Caller. We have to shut it down.”

  “Dear Melody, practical as ever!” JC said cheerfully. “I love it when a plan comes together, and all the options narrow to a point where decisions become inevitable. And, given that the light blazing out of the rear carriage is so much stranger and soul-numbingly disturbing than all the others, I think we can safely assume that that…is the machine, in the baggage-car. Mr. Laurie, please stay right where you are, so we don’t have to worry about you. Team Ghost Finders, follow me.”

  “I’m quite happy to stay with Mr. Laurie,” said Happy.

  “What?” said JC. “And miss all the fun?”

  “Fun is overrated.”

  “You stand a much better chance of surviving if you stick with me,” said JC.

  “Right with you, boss,” said Happy, miserably.

  “Go, team!” said Melody.

  The three of them stuck close together as they moved slowly and cautiously down the platform, maintaining what they hoped was a safe distance from the carriages. Strange phosphorescent lights rose and fell behind the windows as though disturbed by unknown tides. The possessed dead passengers pressed up close against the bulging glass of the windows, crawling over and around each other like so many insane insects. The Ghost Finders did their best not to look at them. Some horrors are harder to bear than others. It wasn’t the passengers’ fault, what had happened to them, what had been done to them; but that didn’t make it any easier to look at. A mad soul is so much harder to consider than a mad mind. Because where sanity runs out, the Outside moves in.

  It made sense to have stuck the Ghost Caller in the baggage-car, at the end of the train, as far-away from the passengers as possible; but in the end it hadn’t made any difference. JC insisted that they all walk the length of the train at a steady pace because it would have been only too easy to lose control and break into a run; and they couldn’t afford to lose control here, in these conditions, not even in the smallest of ways. The light blasting out of the baggage-car’s single grilled window was blindingly bright, incandescent almost beyond bearing, so harsh that even JC had to screw up his altered eyes to deal with it. The station gloom seemed to shrink away from the light as though it was afraid or intimidated. JC found the door to the baggage-car and tried it. Locked, of course, with an immense steel padlock. JC tore the heavy door right off its hinges and threw it aside. He pulled himself up into the new opening and entered the rear carriage. Melody and Happy looked at the thrown-aside door, lying on the platform, looked at each other, then followed JC into the baggage car.

  The light was easier to bear once they got inside, as their eyes adjusted to the new conditions. It only took them a moment to recognise the Ghost Caller. It wasn’t a machine, after all. It was a human corpse, sitting upright in a stiff-backed chair, held firmly in place by a series of heavy leather straps and restraints. Even after so long Away, or perhaps because of it, the body was still perfectly intact. Not a trace of rot or decay, nor any smell of formaldehyde or any other preservative. The three Ghost Finders looked into the set grey face of the dead man and knew him immediately. It was Dr. Emil Todd. The head had been cut open, quite neatly, sawn across above the eyebrows.

  JC, Melody, and Happy moved slowly forward, surrounding the corpse. There was nothing else in the carriage worth looking at. They all leaned in, to look inside the dead man’s head. There was a brain, but quite clearly it had come from someone else. It slumped to one side, not even close to fitting. A series of brass and copper wires had been threaded through the brain, to hold it in place in the oversized skull. Silver pins protruded from the pink-and-grey matter, set in strange patterns, like a grotesque pincushion. And on top of the truncated head, someone had carefully placed an ornate crown, made of silver, with a dozen human eyeballs set firmly in place at regular intervals, staring unblinkingly out at the world.

  “Okay,” said Happy, breathlessly, “that is seriously creepy, and I have seen more than my fair share of creep.”

  “It’s also a major disappointment,” said Melody. “I was looking forward to examining some glory of steampunk engineering, not this…messed-about abomination. What the hell is this?”

  “That is my body, given in repentance for all the wrong I did,” said a new voice, behind them. They all looked around sharply, and there in the baggage-car with them was the ghost of Dr. Todd. Staring sadly at his own corpse. “This is what I gave up my life for and why I have spent my death here, trying to prevent its return. There were supposed to be protections set in place, to prevent the Ghost Caller from activating. They promised me there would be protections…A defensive circle around the chair, binding Wards and Signs carved into the wooden floor…But they lied.”

  “They?” said JC, carefully.

  “My partners in crime,” said Dr. Todd. His voice was clear, but distant, as though it had to travel some unknowable interval to reach them. “Let their worthless names be forgotten by history. I let them kill me, and make use of my body, to create this wonder…and repair my reputation. I never meant to cheat people. When I started out, I wanted to give comfort to the bereaved. But I was tempted—by the money, and the fame, and the women…and I fell. This was to be my recompense. A device to summon ghosts, real ghosts…To do what I could not.

  “I sat down in that chair, and they tightened the straps around me. A terrible experience, to sit down, knowing you will never stand up again. Almost as bad as having the top of my head sawn off. They couldn’t give me opiates, you see; it would have interfered with the process. I can’t remember if I screamed. I probably did. I passed out long before they cut and levered my brain out of my skull, and I died. Imagine my surprise when I discovered I was still there, as a ghost. I watched a
s they removed my brain, according to my instructions and specifications, and replaced it with the stolen brain of Oliver Lando, a genuine medium, with quite amazing psychic powers. The man who’d replaced me in the public affection, with his very successful tour of the provinces.

  “I could have chosen someone else, some other genuine medium; but he was so very powerful…and I regret to say I could be a very petty man, back when I was alive. He was the real thing, you see: no tricks, no showmanship, a genuine Voice for the dead. Everything I’d aspired to be. I like to think he would have approved of what we made from his stolen brain. After I had him murdered.”

  “What’s that thing on his head?” said Melody.

  “That, dear lady, is the Crown of Tears,” said Dr. Todd. “My associates brought the design to me, the one thing I needed to be sure my Ghost Caller would work. Twelve human eyes, removed from the heads of six genuine psychics. I insisted we take only their eyes, not their lives. I saw no need to be cruel. Twelve psychic eyes, in the proper setting, to amplify the power of Lando’s brain, boosted by what was done to my body. Part engineering, part magic, part…

  “I had help. That’s all you need to know.”

  “Your Ghost Caller is still operating,” said Happy. “I can hear its false Voice, see its rotten Light. It’s still summoning ghosts, right now. And they will come like moths to a consuming flame. You can’t let this go on. Your…device must be shut down.”

  “I don’t know how,” said Dr. Todd. “I never did. Operation of the marvellous device was to be left to my associates as they toured the country, in all the biggest theatres. Bringing back the dearly departed, to give comfort to those they’d left behind.”

  “You thought the authorities would allow a corpse to be exhibited, and call up ghosts?” said Melody. “No wonder Julien Advent shut you down.”

  The ghost smiled thinly. “Is that what it says in the history books? No. My associates heard he was coming and made haste to load the device onto this train. To get away and hide, and make plans for the future. They didn’t know I was still there, watching. I’d seen how powerful my device was and how much damage it could, would, cause. So I used the last of my power over the Ghost Caller to send the train Away. And I have stood guard in this place ever since, preventing its return. Until now.”