S*W*A*G*G 1, Spook

by Jill Marshall

  And so they’d created GHOST, a clever acronym from all their names: Gideon, Henry, Oscar, Simone and Trent. He sometimes wondered if the others were truly committed. Both Oscar and Trent were madly in love - not with science, as he was, but with Simone. They fought over her on the rugby field, at their card games, over what video to put in the VCR, so much so that Gideon often suspected that their little club was far more to do with trying to impress the cleverest girl in school.

  But then he’d received the ring for his seventeenth birthday, and as he’d never be able to wear such an ornate thing in public, like the idiot he was he’d spent days – weeks, even - researching rubies, poring over the micro-fiche in the school library, discovering what properties they had, how they were formed, how fake rubies could be created.

  It was only at that point that he’d discovered about the different types of waves that emanated from it – long ultra-violet and infra-red. Then Trent and Oscar had really gone into overdrive, setting up companies to patent the testing equipment under the tutelage and encouragement of their business-minded fathers. He had university to look forward to, they reasoned, but they would have to go straight into the world of work. They had to protect their interests. Their creations.

  Only they weren’t their inventions.

  They were Gideon’s.

  Gideon’s parents weren’t that way inclined, of course, for which he had always been very grateful. His dad was a history teacher, qualified after the war when not enough young men came back from fighting to fill the positions. His mother was just glad to have been given the gift of a son, late in life when such thoughts and hopes had almost evaporated.

  They always thought they didn’t understand him sufficiently, seeking advice from the younger, more “with it” parents of his friends, but the fact was, they understood him perfectly. He was an exact blend of the two of them, keen-minded and curious about the truth, about life itself, like both of them, and gently compassionate about mankind, just like his father. A compound. That’s what he was. A compound like the chemical combination from which rubies could be produced in a chemistry experiment, precise and flawless – or soulless, in Gideon’s view.

  But the others had become overly excited, promising each other great success, huge riches, with their families urging them on at every turn. They’d argued over the rights and wrongs of mass-producing rubies to flog to their friends unknowingly, as Henry Snr had done to Gideon’s own father, and then they’d argued over the rights and wrongs of creating transmitters with those very same rubies, and then they’d argued over the group, and whether Gideon should remain it if he wasn’t interested in the future.

  ‘It’s all I’m interested in,’ he’d shouted, one night when the five of them were camped out in the tiny kitchen of his parents’ cottage, fiddling fractiously with their tea-cups as one or other of them became increasingly agitated. ‘Forwards and backwards, learning from history, improving the future with our knowledge. You’re talking about controlling people and duping them! That’s not right. That’s what Hitler was trying to do. The war was less than thirty years ago, guys. Haven’t we remembered its lessons?’

  Trent stood up, mocking, chest-thumping for Simone’s benefit. ‘Flynn, it’s 1972. Get with the times, man.’ And then he’d grabbed Gideon’s father’s favourite item from the top shelf – the rifle his own grandfather had used in the Boer War. ‘Come on,’ he cried in a poor imitation of Gideon’s voice, ‘What about the war? What about guns and rifles and Hitler?’

  ‘Put it down, Trent,’ Henry had said, all smiles and smooth tones. He’d be a politician one day, like his father – they all agreed on that. Probably as slimy a character as well, though Gideon kept that one to himself. ‘Come on. Don’t be an idiot.’

  ‘No, I like it,’ said Trent, and he’d pointed it at Oscar’s head.

  Oscar, his rival in love, and life, and everything.

  It was never anything to do with Gideon, really. Or Henry. They were just hapless by-standers. It was all about the three of them – Simone, Trent and Oscar. The only thing was that Gideon wasn’t sure how far Trent would take it. He was always fisty, always the one to fly off the handle.

  And now he was standing in the Flynns’ kitchen with a rifle in his hand – an old unused one, granted, but a firearm, nonetheless.

  So Gideon had done the grown-up thing as Oscar quivered in the corner of the kitchen, and Simone attempted to look unconcerned and Henry poured oil over troubled waters. He’d walked across to Trent, and taken the gun off him. Then he’d left the house, because he wanted them out of it, with all their posturing and empty promises. He wanted them out of his home, so small that his parents had suddenly announced that night that they were going to the pub, which they never did, just to give him some space with his friends. Probably been advised to do that by Harry Wentworth or Paul Varley, both of whom owned mansions with more rooms than they knew what to do with and so much space they’d never notice their own teenage children.

  He’d just meant to get it out of sight, then come back and ask them to leave. That was all. GHOST would be over, but he was glad. His father had taken a few shares in it in Gideon’s name, prompted by the other parents, but it had lost its meaning for him. Like the ruby, it was meant to be natural. The manufactured ones lost their lustre.

  Turning right as he eased out of the front door, he’d loped along to the triangle of grass that masqueraded as a park. Here he’d learned from his parents how the angle of the sun’s rays affected the growth of the grass, and many other marvellous tricks and treasures of nature. There was a hollow tree in which he’d hidden his bounty when he was little; the gun could just stay there until this nonsense was over.

  But Trent’s blood was running high. He had that gleam in his eye that always appeared during rugby matches or other vigorous sports – all the things Gideon avoided.

  Suddenly Varley was upon him, wrestling the rifle out of Gideon’s hands as the others tumbled through his doorway, crying out to Trent, to Gideon, telling them to stop, put the rifle down, don’t be stupid ...

  It was an accident, of course. Trent would never have meant to fire the gun. He wasn’t to know how ancient it was, and unstable, or that the combination of oxygen, old gunpowder and the violent shaking would make it … well, not fire, exactly, but explode – explode between their bodies ...

  Shrapnel had sliced into Gideon’s liver and spleen and he’d gone instantly, right there on the park. For Trent, it was almost worse. Bullet casings and shards of metal lodged themselves in his hip, missing all his major organs by a fraction but causing a great deal of pain, forever, along with the agony of what he’d done. What he’d caused.

  They all believed that Simone married him, in the end, out of sympathy.

  Gideon had come back on the very same spot, in the shadows beneath the trees where he’d watched nature turn the wheel of time, creating its miracles. He’d sought revenge, of course, for such a long time, but he didn’t have the power to cause any damage. He kept a distant eye on the shares that his father had never even gone near, and dreamed of what HOST might have been if he’d still been around.

  Eventually he started to hear of the others – others in the half-life, or at least deeply unusual – and finally he understood that the power could be his now, if he chose to organise it. The power to avenge his death …

  Then the Games had been conceived, and he’d discovered what they were planning to do. Trent objected – he’d learned his lesson when he and Gideon fought – but the others were relentless. Bold and diabolic and relentless. Oscar and Simone were plotting again, and Henry was too weak to stand up to them. Poor Trent. He’d rung his own death knell by threatening to leave HOST.

  And when he saw what they did to Trent who’d opposed them, paralysing him before putting him into an MRI machine that would rip the bullets up through his body, shooting him for the inside - that was when he knew what he had to do. The money could finally be put to good use, spent remotel
y and secretly.

  It was his money, anyway.

  And somehow, he had to finish what he’d started.

  Chapter 24 - To Do or Die

  ‘What do you mean, they’re both dead?’ demanded Tilly.

  Janey checked the countdown clock. There was less than a minute to go before the opening ceremony of the World Community Games was broadcast all over the globe. If she started explaining now, all would be lost.

  ‘I’ll fill you in afterwards if I can, but for now, could you all just trust me? We have to stop the global activation of the rubies, and that means getting to Gideon. Jack, it’s going to hurt, I’m afraid.’

  For several precious second, three confused expressions loomed before her eyes. She’d lost them. It was too much to ask, to announce that someone they’d met several times didn’t actually exist – not in the usual sense of the word, anyway.

  Then she saw the people crowded into this glass cell with her, and, perhaps for the first time, she truly saw them: Jack, a Lord who’d rejected his status in life and ended up helping people through their death experience; Tilly, a weird combination of feisty kick-boxing teenager and a whole host of other inexplicable and magical things, and Stein, the lonely ancient alchemist who created, not just gold, but friends of his own, just to make life bearable. If anybody (and that included feline, canine and three-hundred-years-old bodies) could understand the need to trust in the unbelievable, it was these guys. If anyone could appreciate that sometimes, nothing was what it appeared to be, it was these three.

  ‘Ready?’ she whispered, hoping from the depths of her Fleet-Feet that they would rise up to her belief in them.

  And Jack shrugged, his shoulders elevating in the same moment and his jet-black Anubis head soaring up from his collarbones to the tips of his ears in a rush. He shook his head as the dog whistle instantly got louder, obviously in agony, but then looked at Janey.

  ‘What do we do?’

  That was it. Janey suddenly started rapping out the orders that formed in her mouth almost before she had captured them in her mind.

  ‘Jack, get us out of here. There’ll be uproar and they might switch the sound up, but you’ll have to ignore it. Tilly, cut off as many bracelets as you can in the mission control room – we want to be in charge of all the people in there.’

  ‘Aye Aye, Cap’n,’ cried Tilly, spinning like a cat chasing its tail until she really did possess a tail, attached to a lean, feline form with sleek grey fur. She whipped out a sabre claw that would have made Trouble weep with envy and dropped into position ready to launch.

  Now for Stein.

  ‘What about me, Blonde?’ he was saying, but she grabbed him by the wrist and ran towards Jack so that he could transport them all together. ‘You’re coming with me,’ she said, hoping that what she suspected was true.

  Trembling with the onslaught that was rupturing his ears, Jack gathered them all together - with Tilly in her cat-form actually daring to perch upon his shoulder - and then he rushed them through the centimetres-thick glass. It melted around them and then closed again, whole and untouched.

  In the control room, bedlam ensued as the HOST staff found a dog-headed monster careering through their midst, clearing the way for an evil-looking cat to land on their desks, pinning their arm down with one immensely strong leg and, with the other, ripping their wristbands asunder so that they fell onto the floor or into their coffee cups. Jack ploughed heedlessly through any obstacle in his way that wasn’t human – computers, lecterns, control desks, screens – and threw people into a pile, trapping them beneath each other in the centre of the room, ready for the feline cutting machine.

  Thirty seconds to go.

  While the pair got on with removing wristbands, Janey steered Stein towards the balcony where Gideon and Trent were still engaged in a fight to the death – or so it would seem. Janey suddenly realised how mindless it was for this to go on. How could the result be any worse than their present reality, trapped in spirit bodies and able to touch only each other?

  Because she was pretty sure that was the case. It made sense of so much, like Gideon’s ‘condition’, for instance. It wasn’t that he had something wrong with his hands that might infect someone else or hurt him if he came into contact with anything - it was that his hands had no corporeal form. It was why he’d managed to slide so easily through the gates around Richmond Park. The bars had gone through him, not the other way round. And it was why Jack, she guessed, had been able to see Trent Varley at the HOST offices as he was accustomed to seeing spirits. And Tilly was a witch, so she’d see him okay. She wasn’t sure how she and G-Mamma could see Trent, but luckily someone else was also used to a bit of deadness.

  ‘Up here,’ she cried to Stein, and they charged up the stairs towards the battling duo.

  Once again, Gideon was bearing the brunt of it, crouching low to avoid the thunderous blows from Trent Varley’s angry ghost. Janey ran straight through Trent’s torso; he half-stood, outraged, staring at his hands and body and then at Janey and Gideon, before his arm to bring down a crushing blow on Gideon’s shoulder.

  ‘Stein, your flagon!’

  The boy stopped short, fumbling in his pocket for the flask of pom juice.

  ‘I hope this is as good as I think it is,’ said Janey, remembering the strange heat sources that had glowed in her Gogs when she surveyed the castle’s laboratories.

  ‘It is a potent unguent,’ Stein confirmed with a small smile. Then he handed the flask to her.

  Ten seconds to go until the games went live.

  Janey flung the pom juice unguent over Gideon’s faded, semi-transparent shape, and held her breath.

  ‘Will this work?’ she whispered to Stein.

  ‘Gadzooks, I have no idea. I have never tried it without a body before.’

  Gideon was gazing at her, half in shock and half in wonderment, his outline shimmering in and out of focus as Trent Varley’s fist descended like an anvil, powering relentlessly towards Gideon’s crouched body …

  … and then passing right through it. They were no longer made from the same matter – or non-matter.

  Gideon gasped, sucking in a great rattling breath as if waking from a dream, then he shot to his feet as Varley stared at his hands, his lifeless, formless hands, and then at Gideon.

  They all looked at Gideon, in fact.

  His silhouette glowed with a delicate red-gold light, and where his eyes had been sunken and dark, they sparkled now with life and awareness. His skin was still pale, but a faint pink tinge touched his angular cheekbones, and for the first time, Janey could see colour in his lips.

  ‘I … you’ve done it!’ he whispered, lifting his hands before his face and studying them, eyes round with wonderment and delight.

  He turned to Janey, palms upward, showing her the shimmer of light across his skin – actual skin. He was trying to say something when a bell rang behind them.

  ‘You’re too late,’ said Trent Varley’s ghost. ‘I told you only knew half of it,’ he roared at Janey.

  ‘We can still tell everyone what’s happening. Expose the others,’ she said. ‘Or turn off the control connection on the bracelets.’

  He shook his head, his image dimming in contrast to the flickering, flaring light from the multiple screens in the control room, where Jack and Tilly were now rounding up stray employees who had tried to run off and liberating them of their wristbands.

  ‘That’s just a fraction of what the bands can achieve,’ he said scornfully. ‘We were doing things on a mighty scale. All those thousands of athletes, each with a sharp little ruby hovering directly over their wrist – if you do anything else, they’ll flip the switch and the rubies will be on transmit.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Gideon Flynn rose to his full height. It was the first time Janey had seen him when he wasn’t hunched over, often with his hands in his pockets, and now he towered above her. ‘It means,’ he said, his voice stronger as the unguent worked its m
agic, ‘that they’ve got us over a barrel. They’ll send out microwave rays that will damage the athletes’ nerve endings, or possibly worse, if we try to stop them.’

  ‘It’s all your fault,’ said Varley, shaking with rage. ‘Why did you let them do this in the first place? You’ve been advising them, you must have. They haven’t the brains to do this themselves!’

  ‘So that’s why you’ve been attacking me!’ Gideon moved to grab Varley by the arm, but his hand, so delicately real, drifted through the ghost-man’s sleeve. ‘Trent, you know that’s not true. I didn’t want it, any of it. And Simone – well, I hate to say it, but she always had the brains for it, and the beauty, and the ability to make you all fight each other instead of her. She’s behind it all.’

  ‘No! You’ve been guiding them, I know it. And then you got this circus outfit to support you. I knew there was something peculiar when I realised that dog-headed boy could see me. That’s why I followed him through that tunnel and found the other freak show in Transnordia. You’ve been leading everyone! Everyone to carry on with your original plans.’

  ‘Trent, man, I’ve been dead,’ said Gideon with a short laugh. ‘How would I have done that when they couldn’t even see me?’

  ‘Well, they can see you.’ Trent glared at Janey and Stein. ‘And they can see me,’ he added, confused.

  It had confused her, too, but then she’d put two and two together. ‘The others can see you both because they’re not entirely human, and as for G-Mamma and me – I think it must be the rubies that changed our vision. We were both scratched by one.’

  Trent winced. ‘It’ll change your vision for sure, especially when they stick it in your eyeball.’

  ‘That’s why your eyes were twitching, even through the curare,’ whispered Flynn. ‘The control switch?’

  ‘Simone’s ring,’ said Trent. ‘You saw me then? In the surgery?’