Ghostfinders 01 - Ghost of a Chance

held high.
    Everywhere he went, the tunnels and platforms were full of odd sounds and weird smells, and things glimpsed out of the corner of his eye that were never there when he turned to look at them directly. He kept thinking he caught glimpses of people, turning the corner ahead of him, or peering briefly out of open archways, but they were never there when he arrived. And though he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, there was something subtly wrong about these people that disturbed him strangely on some deep unconscious level.
    As though there was something obscurely loathsome about them that he ought to know, ought to recognise. While he still had time.
    JC strode up and down the white-tiled corridors, investigated every platform, and made a point of peering into every single tunnel-mouth. The adrenaline was really buzzing now, and he was grinning widely. He was walking alone, into the face of danger and the heart of the unknown, and he couldn’t have been happier. On every case, he couldn’t wait for the overture to begin, for a chance to come face-to-face with something he’d never seen before. It was the only reason he stayed with the Institute. He couldn’t wait for the supernatural to start its act, reveal its hidden hand, for good or bad, so he could roll up his sleeves and get stuck in. Because once he was actually doing something, he’d be too busy to feel scared.
    For all his studiedly calm exterior, JC knew enough about his job to be sensibly cautious. But he also knew, or thought he knew, enough about the situations he faced every day . . . to be pretty sure of what needed doing to put things right. He knew things, had taught himself things, that the rest of his team never knew about, and that the Boss would almost certainly not approve of. JC believed in being prepared, and very heavily armed, at all times; and some of the things he carried in the inner pockets of his marvellous cream suit were officially banned by the Geneva Convention. (Supernatural and Weird Happenings Section.)
    He stopped abruptly, half-way down a platform, and looked around. He was almost certain he’d been there before; but everywhere he looked, things seemed subtly different . As though certain details were changing, in slow and sneaky ways, right before his eyes. Someone was playing tricks on him. He walked slowly forward, and the posters on the wall beside him stirred lazily, the details seeming to blur and shimmer, rearranging themselves before his eyes. An ad for the new James Bond movie was suddenly an old propaganda poster from World War II, when whole families huddled together deep in the Underground, sheltering from the bombs of the Blitz. A simple cartoon, backed up by a government admonition to keep your mouth shut in case of spies: Be Like Dad; Keep Mum. The cartoon father-figure turned its simple head and winked an eye at JC. Blood ran from its mouth.
    JC reached out to touch the poster, then pulled his hand back again. He had a sudden horrible intuition that it might plunge on into the poster, as though into a deep pool. He made himself walk on, as outwardly casual and unconcerned as ever. The next poster shouted the wares for some new overblown sci-fi epic. As JC watched, the improbable starships, with their blazing energy beams stabbing across the starry night, faded slowly away, revealing instead a stark and brutal poster entitled: What You Should Do in the Case of Sonic Attack . It made scary reading. At the top was a date: 35 October, 2118.
    JC kept walking, increasing his pace slightly, glancing at the posters he passed. Scenes seemed to slip and slide, slyly re-creating themselves. Disturbing images clung to the wall, becoming strange windows into unsettling alien worlds and strange dimensions, all of them accompanied by unfamiliar text—the kind of writing you see in dreams, rich and meaningful, packed with a terrible significance and urgent warnings you can’t quite seem to grasp. JC walked faster and faster, wanting to see as much as possible while he could. He was fascinated. What would have unnerved and disturbed lesser men was meat and drink to him.
    And yet, at the same time, a small but very real voice insisted on being heard, informing him that the only reason he was so immersed in his work . . . was because he had nothing else in his life he cared about. He never allowed himself to think that out loud. Not even when he lay awake in his single bed, in the early hours of the morning