Ghostfinders 02 - Ghost of a Smile

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.
    “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.
    Happy looked quickly around him, then froze in place as he realised the far end of the laboratory floor had disappeared. In its place, strange lights flared and flickered in an off-kilter honeycomb of caves and depressions, held together with shimmering ectoplasmic strands. Thick fluids dripped, lubricants for the cells of the honeycomb as they turned and revolved around each other. As Happy watched, new cells slowly formed at the edge