“They’re dead,” said Happy.
There was something in the way he said it that made everyone else look at him. JC considered him thoughtfully.
“Is that a feeling, or do you know something you really should be sharing with the rest of us?”
“I can feel death in this building,” said Happy. “Like a shroud hanging over everything. And especially in this lobby. Recent death. Sudden death. I don’t think they even knew what hit them until it was too late.”
“Who killed them?” said JC. “Or is it What?”
“I can’t put a name to it,” said Happy. It’s like nothing I’ve seen or felt before. And I’ve been around.”
JC looked at Kim. “Are you picking up any of this?”
“No,” said Kim. “Not a thing. And that’s wrong… If people died here, I should be able to see something… The world is full of ghosts, and fellow travellers, and images that come and go. I see all the things we share the world with. Comes with being a ghost. There are things here on the street with us right now, paying close attention to the building. But when I look into the lobby, there’s nothing there. So I can only assume that someone is hiding what’s happened from me. Which means, I get to go in first.”
She smiled sweetly at JC and stepped through the closed door before he could stop her. She ghosted through the glass as though it weren’t there, and for her, it probably wasn’t. She strode into the lobby and looked quickly about her. JC tensed, his hands pressed flat against the door glass as he watched her every movement intensely. But nothing happened. Kim walked up and down the lobby, her feet bare inches above the deep pile carpet, peering interestedly at everything, until finally she turned to look back at JC and the others and shrug helplessly.
“That’s it,” said JC. “We’re going in.”
But when he tried the door-handle, it wouldn’t move. Someone had locked the door from the inside. JC swore loudly and rattled the door with all his strength, like that was going to make any difference. He scowled, stepped back, and kicked the door moodily.
“Typical of Patterson. He could at least have supplied us with a set of keys.”
Melody shouldered him aside and smashed the glass with one savage karate kick. She sneered at JC.
“Keys are for wimps.”
JC pushed past her, stepped carefully through the door-frame, and hurried into the lobby. “Hello, ghosties! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
“I hate it when he does that,” growled Melody, following him in. Happy nodded glumly.
The Ghost Finders came together in the middle of the lobby and looked around them. Everything was still and quiet, and not in a good way. There was something wrong with the stillness. It was the stillness of anticipation, of something bad about to happen. As though an unspeakable monster was getting ready to jump out at them from some hidden place. As though trap-doors were about to open under their feet, to send them plummeting down to some unimaginable horror. As though all the rules were about to be changed in some terrible game they didn’t even know they were playing.
“Oh, this is bad,” said Happy. “This feels really bad.”
“My back is crawling,” said Melody. “Like someone painted a target on it.”
Kim looked at JC. “What do you feel, sweetie?”
“Like we’re being watched,” he said. “And I don’t see any security cameras.”
“The whole place feels like fingernails dragged down the blackboard of my soul,” said Happy. “I can feel someone sneaking up behind me, but there’s no-one there…”
“Yes,” said Melody, trying to look in several directions at once. “Like someone’s crept in and is peering over my shoulder.”
“Echoes,” JC said calmly. “Psychic echoes of something that’s already happened. Don’t let them get to you. Kim, are you picking up any traces of a stone tape recording? If all these people were killed here, it might have imprinted on the surroundings…”
“It’s worse in here,” said Kim. “It’s been made worse. Bad things happened here, on purpose. Someone walked in blood and murder, and loved it. JC, this whole building is saturated with unnatural energies. Trying to see what happened here is like staring into a spotlight.”
Melody went straight to the reception desk, sat down before the built-in computer, fired it up, and let out a brief sigh of relief as her fingers tripped busily across the keyboard, teasing and intimidating information out of the computer files.
“For a really major company, with big-time security protocols, their firewalls are strictly amateur night,” she said smugly.
“Open up every file you can access,” said JC. “I have questions.”
“I’m in,” said Melody. “Easy-peasy. What do you want to know?”
Happy looked at her. “Don’t you need passwords, things like that. ..?”
“Passwords are for wimps, too,” said Melody. “You have to know how to talk to these things. Okay… They started the latest drug trial last evening. Code name, Zarathustra. Oh shit. That is not good. Whenever some scientist starts quoting Nietzsche, you know it is never going to be good.”
“‘I teach you the superman,’” JC said solemnly. “He is this thunder, he is this lighting. ‘Man is something that should be overcome.’”
“Damn,” said Happy. “Are you saying they were trying to make superhumans here? I thought there were a whole bunch of really serious laws against messing around with human DNA?”
“Oh there are,” said JC. “Lots and lots. Which is why there are also a whole bunch of companies and governments lining up to pay serious money to the first people to come up with something useful. No questions asked. There’s a quiet undeclared race on to produce something that will improve people. Superman, super-soldier, supergenius-all of them property, not people.”
“There’s nothing here about what this particular drug was supposed to do,” said Melody. “I can’t get into the science laboratories’ files from down here. I need direct access. Which means we need to go further up and poke around… I can tell you that the new drug was administered to the volunteers around seven hours ago. So whatever went wrong, it went wrong really fast. I’ve got a list here, names and information on all the volunteers. Are you really a volunteer if they pay you and don’t properly explain the dangers?”
“Depends how much they pay,” said Happy.
“Forty thousand pounds, for two weeks, plus bed and board,” said Melody.
“Chicken feed,” said JC. “That’s what they usually pay for testing cold cures, hand creams, allergy meds. Presumably the company didn’t want to risk drawing attention to what they were doing. How many test subjects were there, Melody?”
“Twenty. Ten men and ten women, ages twenty to thirty. Of course, some of them would have been given a harmless placebo… Testing took place on the second floor; living quarters for the test subjects are on the first floor. Laboratories on the third… no information on the remaining floors.”
“Something’s coming,” Kim said suddenly, and they all looked around.
The air was suddenly colder, painfully cold in their lungs as they breathed it in. Something was sucking all the heat out of the room. An energy drain, to power some kind of manifestation. There was a growing tension across the lobby, as though something might break, or explode. Suddenly, footsteps started down the stairs at the far end of the lobby. Slow, heavy, and quite deliberate footsteps, descending from above. Each separate sound seemed to hang on the air, unnaturally long, as though reluctant to depart. JC gestured quickly for everyone to spread out at the foot of the stairs, blocking them off. He and Kim got there first, peering eagerly up the stairs, but there was no-one to be seen yet. Melody reluctantly got up from her computer and moved across to join them. Happy stood behind her, not quite hiding. They waited at the foot of the stairs as the footsteps drew steadily nearer, louder, heavier… and then, at the moment when whoever was making them would have had to come round the corner at the top of the stairs, and reveal themselves, the sounds stopped. The last of the echoes died away, and there was only the quiet, and the increasingly oppressive stillness.
JC and the others waited, tense and ready for anything, but the footsteps had stopped. Nothing to hear, nothing to see. JC ran forward and sprinted up the steps to look round the corner, but there was no-one there. No sign there had ever been anyone there. JC came back down the stairs, scowling.
Then the elevator bell rang.
They all looked round sharply, and JC led the way as they raced over to the other side of the lobby, to the single elevator. The down arrow above the door was lit, and the row of numbers showed that the elevator was
