gaze with her own.
“Come back to us, Happy. Come back to me. Don’t leave me here alone, in the light.”
His eyes snapped back into focus, and he smiled at her. “I never knew your voice could reach so far. All right, I’m back. I don’t like it, but I’m back. What’s happening, and is it too late to head for the exit?”
“The Doctor… is in,” said a voice, seeming to float down the long, open floor towards them. A foul, desiccated voice, dripping with ill will.
The whole floor was changing. The very structure and constituents of the long laboratory became warped and twisted, wrenched out of shape by unnatural forces. Advance harbingers of the Mad Doctor ghosts, altering the world into something more to their liking, something more able to support their awful existence. Making the world over into a reflection of their own insane needs and wishes. Solid surfaces slumped, flowing and re-forming. Metal ran away in lumpy streams, like melting wax, while scientific equipment heaved and turned, taking on new shapes and meanings. The walls bowed slowly inwards, and the ceiling drooped. The light intensified, becoming painfully bright-perhaps because the Mad Doctors wanted what was happening to be clearly seen, and appreciated. Or perhaps to make the hunting easier.
The computer Melody had been working on swelled up suddenly. The monitor screen burst stickily and vomited its contents onto the floor. The pool spread, as bits of silicon and steel grew legs and scuttled across the floor like maddened insects. All across the laboratory, machines unfolded like blossoming flowers, becoming strange enigmatic things with too many angles. The glass windows all along the far wall disappeared. Where they should have been was nothing -an absence in the world, something the eye couldn’t even acknowledge.
“Scalpel, scalpel, shining bright, in the horror of the night,” said the voice. “What unnatural hand and eye can undo thy yielding flesh?”
“I am getting serious operating-theatre vibes,” said Happy. “And not in a good way.”
“Look,” said Melody, pointing down the long floor. “The Mad Doctors are here.”
They came scuttling and crawling, around and over and in between the warped and twisted structures that now filled the laboratory. They moved in sudden darts, like white-coated spiders, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on more. Mad Doctors in pristine white gowns and blood-spattered surgical masks, ghostly hands clutching scalpels and bone-saws and sharp steel probes. Their eyes were cool and vicious and full of a terrible, hot insanity. They had left their humanity behind them when they died and become something else, with new thoughts in their twisted minds, and dark foul emotions.
There was no way of telling how many Mad Doctor ghosts there were. They were here and there and everywhere, blinking in and out, never still.
“We can see what’s wrong with you,” said the voice. It didn’t seem to come from any one ghost in particular. “We can see what’s bad in you. We’re going to cut it out and play with it, and make it ours. And oh what fun we’ll have-while you last.”
“Happy,” JC said quietly. “Are they really there? I mean- physically there?”
“Oh yes,” said Happy. “Very, very definitely solid and real… These are powerful manifestations, JC. Dead, but not departed. I think
… they exist in the spaces between spaces, in the odd little gaps and lacunae of reality, hiding like trap-door spiders. Think of them as a by-product of the process that made the New People. Or think of them as aetheric parasites. Remaking the laboratory was them putting on something more comfortable. They want to terrify us. I think they feed on fear.”
“They’re still ghosts,” said JC. “And we deal with ghosts.”
“They’re predators,” said Kim, her nose wrinkled with disgust. “And they’re hungry. I can see them more clearly than you can. They’re not human any more. I don’t have words for what they’ve made themselves into, for what they really are. They’re insane, JC, and their madness is contagious. It’s affecting the world.”
“Can we destroy them?” said JC.
“They’re dead,” said Kim. “But not all the way. You might say.. . they’re clinging on to existence by their fingernails. Their madness lets them do impossible things, but that very madness is what makes their grip on reality so precarious. Pry them loose, JC.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” said JC, rubbing his hands together in a brisk and hearty fashion.
“But what are we going to do?” said Happy. “I don’t see our usual bag of tricks working with these ghosts. And those scalpels look really sharp.”
“We’ll do what we always do,” JC said grandly. “Experiment, with extreme prejudice.”
“How do I get out of this chicken-shit outfit?” said Happy.
The Mad Doctor ghosts came charging forward. Some ran, some scuttled, some hopped and leapt like white-coated bugs. Some swarmed over the crazily outcropping structures they’d created. Some walked jerkily, in sudden strobelike motions, as though they couldn’t be bothered to cross all the space they travelled through but rather jumped from bit to bit. They brandished their cutting tools with horrible glee, laughing the vague but confident laugh of the utterly insane. Their eyes were deep and dark, horrifyingly empty of anything a sane man could hope to understand.
Melody stepped forward and opened fire with her machine pistol. She swept it back and forth with cool precision, raking the ranks of the Mad Doctor ghosts with a steady stream of bullets. But she couldn’t seem to hit any of them. Some of the ghosts darted back and forth with inhuman speed, easily avoiding the gunfire. Others simply weren’t there when the bullets arrived. And some simply stood and laughed at her as the bullets went straight through them. Bullets ricocheted from warped structures or sank into moist spongy surfaces. The Mad Doctor ghosts laughed their hateful laughs and kept on coming.
JC glanced at Happy. “Even in the midst of all this, I have to ask-where does she keep that gun when she’s not using it?”
“I’ve never dared ask,” said Happy.
“Which part of they’re already dead did you miss, Melody?” said Kim. “You’re not going to take them out with a bullet. You’d have more luck clubbing them over the head with the barrel.”
“Can’t blame a girl for trying,” Melody said airily, making her machine pistol disappear again. “I am now officially open to fresh ideas. Preferably very soon because those bastards are getting really close.”
A Mad Doctor ghost appeared out of nowhere, leaping in from the extended blind spot where the windows used to be. He threw himself at Kim and passed straight through her. She cried out, in shock and horror. The Mad Doctor ghost howled and shrieked and jumped up to run about on the ceiling, slashing at the air with his scalpel. JC moved in close beside Kim, half reaching out to hold her.
“Are you all right, Kim?”
“It wasn’t only his body that went through me,” said Kim. “It was his mind, too. Or what was left of it. His thoughts don’t make sense any more, JC.”
JC nodded quickly, pulled another of his holy-light grenades out of an inner pocket, primed it, and tossed it into the midst of the Mad Doctor ghosts. But it never got there. While it was still in mid air, the ghost standing on the ceiling caught it easily with one hand, then dropped down to squat on a massive steel shape. The Mad Doctor ghost shook its head violently back and forth as it ate the grenade, biting large chunks off it. The bloody surgical mask split like a crimson smile to allow the ghost to chew on the grenade like a toffee apple. Holy light burst out of the grenade in sudden fierce blasts, and the Mad Doctor ghost sucked it all up.
“Close your mouth, JC,” Kim said quietly. “And tell me you’ve got something else up your sleeve apart from your arm.”
“Of course,” JC said quickly. “It’s just that… I rather had my hopes set on those grenades.”
“I’m picking up something!” said Happy. “There’s someone else on this floor, apart from us and those bloody things! I think someone’s running the Mad Doctor ghosts, the same way they ran the shells in the lobby! Someone or something is connecting them, supporting them!”
“I told you they were barely hanging on,” said Kim.
A Mad Doctor ghost slipped and slid across the floor towards them, grinning with malicious intent, moving faster and faster as though gravity and friction were things he didn’t need to bother with any more. He brandished a gleaming bone-saw with horrid glee. JC went forward to meet it, and the bone-saw lashed out with supernatural speed. JC only had time to get his arm up to protect his throat, and then the jagged razor-sharp edge slashed through his sleeve and arm. Blood spread quickly across the ice-cream white sleeve. He didn’t cry out with pain, only glanced at the stain on his sleeve and roared with rage.
