soundlessly at her.
Her head was swimming, and it was all she could do to stand upright. It felt like the floor of the lobby was rising and falling, like a clipper ship at sea. She put out her hands for something to lean on, to steady herself; but there was nothing. She felt hot and sweaty, like a fever she’d had as a child, when it felt like the whole world might melt and run away. Melody growled suddenly, a harsh warning sound from deep in her throat. She was under attack.
That realisation was like a splash of cold water in the face. She couldn’t trust her eyes any more. The world might not feel real any more, but that didn’t mean she was mad. It meant she was under psychic attack. There was danger close at hand; she could feel that very clearly. She felt that there was something she ought to be doing, but she couldn’t seem to clear her mind enough to think what. So she stared at the poster before her, studying the image with all her concentration as though she could make it behave through sheer strength of will.
The young woman in the wedding gown had left the bottom of the long stairway and come forward to press her face up against the other side of the poster as though it were the other side of a mirror. She glared out at Melody, her face twisted with rage and an inhuman malice. Bloody tears ran down her distorted face from her madly staring eyes and dripped steadily off her chin. Her wide-stretched mouth now had lips the colour of dried blood, and it was packed full of needle teeth. She’d raised her hands and slammed them flat against the other side of the poster, the other side of the glass, as though she were banging against it, trying to break through.
Melody wrenched her gaze away and stumbled off, to the left, to stand before the second poster again. The clipper ship was almost gone, only its pointed prow and the tops of the masts still showing above the raging sea. The sky was full of dark clouds and heavy, sleeting rain. The sea was full of sharks, and there were bits of men and long streaks of blood everywhere in the waters. As Melody watched, crimson-tinged waters dribbled down the lobby wall from the bottom of the poster, as though the sea was breaking through. Melody stepped carefully backwards, away from the bloody sea-water pooling on the floor at the foot of the wall.
She found herself standing before the next poster. The four young dead men had emptied their glasses of blood and crushed the glasses to bloody splinters in their unfeeling hands. One of them had turned and sunk his teeth deep into the neck of the young man beside him, who smiled foolishly out at Melody. The other two had come forward, advancing on the poster, as though they could see Melody watching them. Their split-fingered hands reached out to claw their way through the poster and into her world.
In the fourth poster, the headless young woman had stepped forward, out of her doorway. She was holding up her severed head with one hand, thrusting it out at the poster, at Melody. So the head could look right into Melody’s eyes. The severed head was screaming silently, endlessly, eyes wide with an unbearable horror. Blood fell from the severed neck in a dribbling stream.
In the fifth poster, in the wintry country scene, the dark figure was almost at the end of the narrow lane. He was running full tilt as though planning to break through, smash right through the poster, by sheer speed and impact. He was still only a dark figure, roughly human in shape, limbs flailing wildly…but the dimensions were all wrong. As though he was a man from some other world, close enough to ours to be disturbing in its differences.
And in the sixth, and final, poster…the huge, stuffed fox head shook and twisted on its wall plaque, laughing and howling soundlessly. It was so much closer now, its whiskered snout protruding right out of the poster, as though it had forced itself half-out of its world and half-into Melody’s, through sheer force of vicious intent. It snapped its jaws at her. The sharp teeth were red with fresh blood from some recent kill, and the head was so close now that Melody could smell its rank, damp, musky scent.
She looked into the fox’s mad, feral eyes and snarled right back at it. The fox hesitated, caught between moments, not expecting that. Melody stamped one foot hard, to force the floor to feel solid under her foot, and clenched her hands into fists until her nails dug painfully into her palms, and both hands ached from the effort. She laughed harshly into the fox’s face, then deliberately turned her back on it, and all the posters, and walked stiffly back to her scientific instruments. She set herself behind them, where she belonged, and looked down at what her readouts were telling her. She concentrated on every little bit of information, holding every light and number with her gaze, refusing to let them change in any way. Because if they said something was real, then it was. And if they didn’t, then it wasn’t. Her mind might betray her, but not her instruments.
She looked from one monitor screen to the next, from one readout to the next, concentrating. And bit by bit her head cleared, as her machines told her the lobby was perfectly normal. Her head stopped swimming, her legs became firm again, and the fever snapped off as though someone had thrown a switch. Melody wiped clammy sweat from her face with her sleeve and finally lifted her head and looked around the lobby. There were no posters on the walls. Never had been. If there had, of course she would have noticed them, and remembered them. There were a few empty wooden frames, here and there, where old posters might once have been; but that was all. Melody grinned nastily around her and patted the tops of her machines fondly, like they were pets that had remembered their training.
“Good boys. I can always depend on you when some sneaky bastard is playing games with my head.”
She leaned forward, braced herself on top of her instruments with both hands, and let her head hang down for a moment, slowly bringing her ragged breathing back under control. Bringing herself back under control through sheer strength of will. She felt like she’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson, with an anvil on her back. But after a few moments, she brought her head back up proudly and sneered around the empty lobby, showing her teeth in a nasty grin.
“That the best you can do? It’ll take more than that to break me, you bastards!”
One by one, slowly and unhurriedly and without any fuss, the lights in the lobby began to go out. Melody swore briefly and checked her readouts. None of her sensors were indicating anything out of the ordinary, but the lobby lights were quite definitely dimming and going out. Faulty wiring in the lobby? Melody shook her head quickly. That was grabbing at straws, and she knew it. The last few lights went out in a rush, leaving Melody standing alone in the dark, in a small pool of light generated by her monitor screens and work lights. The dark around her was solid and impenetrable, without even an exit light. Melody kicked in the heavy-duty spotlights she’d incorporated into her equipment stand, for just such emergencies as this; but they didn’t make much difference. The pool of light surrounding her instruments grew a little brighter, but it didn’t expand one inch. The light couldn’t seem to push out into the darkness at all.
Melody made herself check her readings methodically, one by one. Everything was functioning as it should, but none of it was telling her anything useful. She glared about her, into the dark. She couldn’t see a damned thing. The lobby was…gone. She had a sudden horrible feeling that she was alone in the dark, that the rest of the world was gone, and only she and her small pool of light remained. As though the world had been taken away, or she had been taken out of it…like the old steam train at Bradleigh Halt. And now she was trapped, floating forever in an endless sea of darkness…She shook her head fiercely and took a firm hold on her thoughts. She wasn’t afraid of the dark. Darkness was only the absence of light. The world was still there; all her sensors said so. Which meant that this was another form of psychic attack. And like the posters, it might be scary, it might mess with her head, but nothing was happening that could actually hurt her.
She activated the communications system built into her decks and called Happy on his mobile. It rang and rang and rang, but nobody picked up. Which was odd. If Happy had turned his phone off, it would have gone straight to voice mail. So why wasn’t he answering? She tried reaching JC, but he didn’t answer either. Unless…someone was shutting off the sound, the same way it was shutting off the light…
Melody placed her hands flat on top of her instruments, and said to herself,
Her head came up sharply, and she glared out into the darkness. Someone was walking around. There were footsteps, in the dark. Not the loud and crashing impacts she’d heard before, up on the stage…but quiet, steady, perfectly ordinary footsteps. Melody listened carefully. On the whole she thought they sounded more like a man’s than a woman’s. And not a particularly big man, at that. Melody smiled. She could handle men. The footsteps
