Ghost of a Smile by Simon R. Green
“Not really,” said Happy. “But we have to. We need to know what’s going on.”
“Good soldier,” said JC.
“Shut up, or I will slap you,” said Happy.
This time, the doctor’s head and shoulders immediately filled the screen. Middle-aged, balding, in a white lab coat too small for him. There was a spray of fresh blood across the left side of his neck and shoulder, clearly not his. His face was deathly pale from shock, his eyes wide, his mouth trembling. He looked quickly about him, as though not sure he was alone, but there were none of the unnerving background sounds from the first vid file. The doctor squirmed in his chair and took a deep breath, visibly bracing himself. He stared into the camera and started talking, no name, no introduction, no build-up. Just the stumbling words of a man desperate to be heard.
“ReSet never was what they told us it was. Curing problems in the human body was only the first step. The bait in the trap, to get us interested. We weren’t told what it would do next, what it was always meant to do. ReSet had another purpose. He knew. He knew that all along. That’s why he funded us. ReSet was intended to make us all that we could be. All we were meant to be. We were never meant to be human. Not merely human. Somehow, part of our DNA got shut down, suppressed, frozen in place. So instead of becoming what we were meant to be, we got stuck part of the way. What we know as Humanity was only meant to be a stepping-stone on the way to something else. But now ReSet has helped finish the job! Taken the test subjects all the way to the end of the line! They’re not human any more. They’re the New People. That’s what they are. Not superhuman, not more than human . . . Something else. Gods. And monsters.”
He stopped to laugh briefly, a sad and bitter sound. “That is what we were meant to be. Gods and monsters? Intelligent design, or evolution’s last laugh? Who knows . . . All of our knowledge and civilisation was a mistake, because what we were supposed to be would never have needed them.”
He started laughing again, and this time he couldn’t stop. He rocked back and forth in his chair and laughed his sanity away.
Melody shut the screen down. “There is more . . . but I don’t think we need to see it. I doubt he had anything else to say.”
“So,” said JC. “ReSet rewrote the test subjects, from the bottom up, transforming the ones that didn’t die into New People. Whatever they are. And they’re still here, presumably somewhere above us. Those that survived the process . . . I think we need to go up and have a nice little chat with them.”
“I just knew he was going to say that,” said Happy. “Didn’t you just know he was going to say that?”
“And what do you mean we, Pale Face?” said Melody. “You heard the mad doctor, gods and monsters, all in the same package. That does not sound like someone you can stroll up to and have a nice little chat with! Give me one good reason why we need to go up and talk with these very scary New People?”
“Because they’re behind everything that’s happening here,” said JC. “That’s why it’s been so easy for us to get answers. They wanted us to know. Be honest, Melody—would you have been able to open up those files so easily under normal conditions?”
“No,” said Melody, reluctantly. “I’m good, but I’m not that good.”
“I don’t think we’re going to be allowed to leave until we’ve seen this through,” said JC. “We’re here for a purpose. I think . . . these New People want something from us.”
“Why us?” said Happy, plaintively. “Why is it always us?”
“They might want us dead,” said Melody. “Have you considered that?”
“If they’d wanted you dead, you’d be dead by now,” said Kim. Everyone looked at her. She shrugged. “That’s what I’m feeling.”
“Anything else you’d like to share?” snapped Happy.
Melody leaned in close to him. “Don’t upset the dead girl,” she murmured. “You really want a ghost mad at you?”
Kim surprised them all by seriously considering Happy’s question, her eyes far away. “Someone is hiding from us. Close by.”
They all looked quickly around, but the long laboratory stretched away before them, open and still and quiet and completely empty.
“Is that it?” said JC.
“For now, yes,” said Kim. “I’m not like Happy. I don’t see or hear things like he does. I just get feelings.”
“I feel things,” protested Happy.
“Of course you do,” said Melody. “In your own special way.”
“Meanwhile, back at the theorising,” JC said determinedly. “Someone was running those ghost shells, down in the lobby. Could that have been the New People? And if so, were they responsible for their deaths?”
“Seems like they killed all the scientists and doctors, and even some of their own,” said Melody. “What’s a few policemen and security men, after that?”
“Hold everything,” said Happy. “Kim’s right—someone else is here with us.”
They all looked round again. Still nothing. The open planning and the bright fluorescent light left nowhere to hide.
“They’re here,” Happy insisted, his eyes wide and scared. “Lots of them. Getting closer all the while. And they don’t feel at all friendly.”
JC looked at Kim, and she nodded quickly. “They’re coming from a direction I don’t understand. From . . . outside reality.”
“Human?” said JC.
“I don’t think so,” said Happy.
“Not any more,” said Kim. “They feel . . . awful. Like something human turned inside out, so all the bad things show. JC, I’m scared.”
“Dead people, come back as something other than people,” said Happy, frowning suddenly. He might have been talking to himself. “Some ghosts are stronger than others. Some are only images, trapped in a repeating moment of Time like insects in amber. Some are recordings, stone tapes playing back. Some are what remains after death. Things that won’t stay dead, or all the way dead, because they’re driven by some overwhelming purpose. And some ghosts are predators . . . leeching energy from the living to maintain their half-life existence in the waking world.
“It’s getting cold, just like in the lobby. Something is sucking all the life energy out of this place, so the ghosts can bleed in from whatever bolt-hole they’ve found to manifest here, with the living.”
“Who is it, Happy?” JC said quietly. “Who is it that’s coming?”
“The Doctors,” said Happy. “Slaughtered and butchered here by their own creations, driven insane just by being here when it happened.”
“Are you saying that simply being around these New People is enough to drive humans crazy?” said Melody.
“They’re too much for us,” said Happy, dreamily. “We can’t cope. Witnessing the change was enough to blow all the Doctors’ fuses. That’s what we’ve got here—the flotsam and jetsam of a radical experiment, the fall-out and debris from the creation of a new thing. Mad Doctor ghosts, riding the coat-tails of the New People, soaking up the energies released to maintain their insane existence after death.”
“Happy?” said JC. “Happy, can you hear me? You’ve gone too far; you need to come back to us.”
“I see you,” said Happy, staring down the long laboratory at something only he could see. “I see you . . .”
Melody stepped in front of him, blocking his view. She raised both hands to cup his face tenderly, meeting his 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 an
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 acr
“Look at what you’ve done to my best suit, you bastard!” JC grabbed the nearest half-melted chair and brought it down on the ghost’s head with all his strength. And perhaps because the Mad Doctor ghost had made the things in the laboratory part of its world, the chair smashed the ghost to the ground. JC hit the ghost with the chair again and again, rage fuelling his strength, and the ghost scuttled away across the floor with JC close behind.
Half a dozen Mad Doctor ghosts hit Melody and Happy from every side at once, forcing them apart. Melody spun and danced, punched and kicked, and held the ghosts at bay through sheer ferocity, for a while. Scalpels and bone-saws cut viciously at her from every side, and every cut came that much closer to getting through. Melody’s fists and feet shot out with deadly skill and furious energy, but none of it did her any good. Sometimes her hands connected with something like flesh and bone, but more often they glanced stickily from a grinning face or sailed right through. The ghosts were only as solid as they chose to be. They faded in and out, even passing through each other as they crowded round Melody. She began to get the feeling that the fight was only continuing because they liked to see her dance.
Happy made a run for it, first chance he got, and the giggling ghosts chased him in and out of the distorted surroundings, cutting at him with their sharp blades, to keep him moving. Every now and again, a ghost would appear suddenly to block his path, and Happy would hit it with a concentrated blast of telepathic disbelief. The Mad Doctor ghost would burst apart in an explosion of ectoplasmic strings, then pull itself back together as Happy ran on. After a while, he noticed that while the ghosts scrambled around and over the maze of enigmatic structures that filled the whole floor, they never ran through any of it. They had entered the physical world and made it theirs, so now they had to follow at least some of its rules. Happy sprinted down a narrow channel, thinking fiercely, and when he got to the end, he stopped and spun around and gave the following Mad Doctor ghosts the finger. They howled with rage and came leaping and skittering after him. He threw his whole weight against the nearest towering structure and forced it over, to fall on top of the ghosts. The sheer weight slammed them to the floor and held them there, and Happy did his special victory dance—only to stop abruptly in mid step as the ghosts began to slowly ooze up through the heavy weight.