Ghostfinders 02 - Ghost of a Smile

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    GHOST OF A SMILE
     
    An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
     
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    Ace mass-market edition / September 2011
     
Copyright © 2011 by Simon R. Green.
     
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Ghosts are messages. From the Past, the Present,
and sometimes the Future.

ONE
    DOGGED BY THE PAST
    It’s a sad fact that these days, there are more places that used to be factories than there are working factories. And many of these old deserted buildings, left to rot and ruin, have become bad places. Haunted by a past they can’t forget and men who can’t forgive.
    There are lots of ways a building can turn bad. Something terrible happens, staining the environs with enough horror and suffering to poison the psychic wells forever, or just the long years’ accumulations of all the petty evils and moral crimes that man is heir to. People make places bad, and bad places make horror shows, to haunt the living with the sins of the dead. People do more than work in factories, and they always leave something of themselves behind.

    Which is why a battered old mini-van, with rusting panels and balding tyres, came crashing to a halt in an overgrown and weed-infested car park, outside the factory building once owned and operated by Winter Industries. The van’s engine fell silent with a series of relieved coughs, and the slow, sullen quiet of evening returned. The huge old building stood open and exposed to the elements, a stark minimalist structure of steel and concrete, looking somehow lost and ill at ease now that it no longer had a function or a purpose. Broken glass in the windows, overlapping graffiti on the walls . . . most of it faded into incoherence, like disappearing voices from the past. The huge open doors at the front had been sealed off with yards of yellow police-incident tapes, their ragged ends whipping mournfully back and forth in the gusting wind.
    From out of the clapped-out old mini-van stepped JC Chance, Melody Chambers, and Happy Jack Palmer.
    The Ghost Finders of the Carnacki Institute.
    It was late evening, heading into night. There were bloody stains on the heavy clouds in the lowering sky, while the sun hung low above the horizon, giving up on the day. There were shadows everywhere, long and deep and dark. The evening light looked stained and damaged, bruised. The gusting wind made a few half-hearted attempts to kick some leaves around the abandoned car park but