with hysterical deafness for a week! In self-defence!”
“I am surrounded by Luddites,” said Melody, working happily away. “Noisy ones, too.”
“What are Luddites?” said Kim. “They sound sort of cuddly.”
“Am I the only one who paid attention at school?” said Melody.
“Probably,” said JC. “You swot, you. You could geek for the Olympics.”
“And pardon me for being dead!” said Kim. “A girl can’t study everything. I did extra drama classes. And flower arranging.”
“Colour me surprised,” said Happy.
Melody put her phone to her ear, and listened intently.
“Can you hear the sea?” Happy said helpfully.
“You slap him, JC,” said Melody. “I’m busy. Wait… I’m getting
… something. I can hear voices…”
“What’s odd about that?” said Kim. “It’s a phone.”
“But I haven’t dialled any number,” said Melody. “I am very definitely hearing voices, but… too far away to make out. Voices, in the system. Are they always there, perhaps, hidden behind our everyday calls? Drowned out by millions of common calls and conversations?”
She fiddled with the exposed parts of the computer, and what she was hearing burst suddenly from the speakers. A sound like a never-ending wind, strange background noises like the singing of insane whales, the frantic pattering of a million angry insects. And then, slowly, human voices began to come forward, rising above the background gabble. Human voices, but far and far away, as though they’d had to cross some unimaginable distance to reach the world. It wasn’t even clear what languages they were using.
“I just had an unnerving thought,” said Happy. “Could we be hearing the collective unconscious? I’ve always wanted to listen in to that.”
“You are entirely right, Happy, that is an unnerving thought,” said JC. “If you have any more, feel perfectly free to keep them to yourself. And anyway, I don’t believe in the human unconscious.”
“Tough,” said Happy. “It believes in you.”
“Keep the noise down,” Melody said sharply. “I’m listening… EVP is a new and barely understood branch of physics. Or psychics. Either way, there’s a lot of theories but hardly any hard evidence you can trust… and then there are moments like this when it rears up and bites you on the nose, and spooks the hell out of you. You are all hearing this, right? A sea of voices, coming and going, on a dead channel. Maybe it’s the voices of everyone who ever spoke on the phone network, somehow recorded and preserved, only slowly fading away.. .”
“Or it could be the dead,” said Kim. Everyone looked at her, and she smiled sweetly. “Dead voices, on a dead channel. Still trying to reach out to the living, to make contact. I used to know this guy who was really into Electronic Voice Phenomena. He said it was the last great frontier of the unknown. He let me listen to some of the recordings he’d made, but I couldn’t hear what he did. It was only noise… the audible equivalent of a Rorschach ink blot. The only shape and meaning is what we provide ourselves.” She looked down her ghostly nose at Melody. “I may not have a dozen science degrees, but I do know a thing or two.”
“There’s far more to EVP than simple pattern recognition,” said Melody, a bit defensively. “Too many people have heard the same sort of thing… Voices where there couldn’t be voices… The dead trying desperately to make contact with the living, to warn them about something, something terrible and terribly important…”
“How come the dead never want to tell us anything nice?” JC said wistfully.
“All right,” said Happy. “You’re scaring me now.”
And then he broke off, as all the clashing voices and deafening background noise cut off abruptly, replaced by a single voice. Slow, dragging, every word an effort. Melody threw her mobile phone away from her, and they all listened to the speakers.
Help me… Please, somebody, help me… Room Seven. Room Seven. Room Seven.
The voice stopped, and the computer speakers fell silent. There was not even a hint of hiss. Melody looked around, but the others were already off and running, heading for Room Seven.
They hadn’t got far down the corridor when they all stumbled to a halt, because the door to Room Seven was quite clearly shut. The only closed door. JC looked quickly up and down the corridor, but there was no-one about. Melody caught up with them and glared at the closed door to Room Seven as though it was a personal insult. Happy stayed at the back, looking past everyone’s shoulder. Kim seemed puzzled.
“All the doors were open the last time we came this way,” she said firmly. “It’s not something you could miss, one shut door among so many open…”
“I walked right past that door to get to Room Fourteen,” said JC. “And I didn’t see anything. Did anyone notice anything?”
They looked at each other, but no-one was sure, one way or the other.
“Somebody has been messing with our heads,” Happy said grimly. “To make us overlook Room Seven. And so subtly, so carefully, even I didn’t realize it. He won’t get away with that again, I’m ready for him now. And now I really want to see what’s in that room. No-one craps in my head and gets away with it.”
Kim stepped forward and thrust her head right through the closed door.
“Oh bloody hell!” said Happy. “I hate it when ghost girl does that! That is so not natural. That is freaking me out big-time!”
“Then don’t look,” said JC. “Anything, Kim?”
She pulled her head out of the door and smiled at JC. “No-one seems to be home. But it really is quite messy.”
JC moved in closer and looked the door over carefully. “The lock’s been smashed. And the steel bolt’s been ripped right out of its socket. I’d say this door was burst open, from the inside, and whoever did it had to be really strong.”
“Inhumanly strong?” said Melody.
“Seems likely,” said JC.
“Suddenly, I’m not at all keen to see what’s in there,” said Happy. “You go ahead, I’ll stand here and keep watch- Take your hands off me! ”
“Well volunteered, that man,” said JC. “God loves a volunteer!”
He pulled the door open and pushed Happy forward into the room. Happy made a whole series of loud protestations, but by then he was already inside, so he shut up and tried for quiet dignity. He sniffed at the air and shook his head.
“Smells like a zoo in here… Like an animal house. Wild, musky, feral… And I can smell blood, too. Oh yes, there it is.”
By that time, they were all inside Room Seven, taking up most of the available space. The room had been trashed. The furniture and fittings had been smashed and torn apart. The carpet on the floor had been ripped and rucked up, as though trampled by wild animals. The computer had been beaten into small pieces and the pieces scattered everywhere.
“That’s not easy to do,” said Melody. “Somebody really had a grudge against this machine.”
Everyone else was looking at the long claw marks gouged deep into the far wall. Blood was splashed thickly across walls and the ceiling. It hadn’t been dried long. Great, heavy, dark red swatches of blood, and one oversized bloody handprint on the inside of the door. JC put his hand beside it, and the print was almost twice as large.
“This is where it all started,” he said finally. “The first unexpected reaction to the drug, perhaps? Did the test subject panic when the bad symptoms began? Did he cry out for help that never came and so had to smash his way out?”
“Was that his voice we heard?” said Melody. “Or was it someone who wanted us to see what someone else was hiding?”
“But look at the claw marks!” said Happy. “The size of them, and the depth of the grooves… think of the strength needed to do that much damage. And smell the animal stench in here! What did the Zarathustra drug do to the poor bastard?”
“Not the kind of superhuman change his minders were expecting, certainly,” said JC. He turned abruptly to Kim. “What do you see here? I need to know what you see because the dead often see things that are hidden from the living.”
“Of course,” said Kim, calmly. “Because the living couldn’t cope.” She looked around, slowly. “I can’t see
