Ghostfinders 02 - Ghost of a Smile

will-o’-the-wisps. JC squinted. The fog was hard on the eye, the featureless grey almost painful to look at for too long. He strained his altered eyes against the fog. He couldn’t shake off a very definite feeling that somewhere deep in the fog, something was staring back at him.
    JC turned to Happy. “Time to do your thing, team telepath. What do you sense about this fog?”
    “Nothing specific,” said Happy, scowling in concentration. “No thoughts, no intent, no emotions . . . Just this diffused sense of presence.”
    Kim nodded immediately, looking nervously this way and that. Melody stuck both thumbs in her belt and tapped one foot ominously on the floor. She felt frustrated and left out, with nothing to contribute. She felt naked without her equipment. With all her usual toys at her disposal, she could have analysed the hell out of the fog by then, broken it down into its various components, and come up with half a dozen different solutions to the problem. But there wasn’t even a computer she could use in the room. She said as much, and JC nodded soberly.
    “We have been relying on the building’s computers, rather a lot. And I’m starting to wonder if we can trust what they’ve been telling us. You said yourself someone was making it too easy for you to access information. Maybe they only meant for us to know what they wanted us to know.”
    “Someone was definitely sending messages through the computers,” said Melody. “And they’ve all been spot on useful, so far.”
    “Quite,” said JC. “Convenient, that. Perhaps a little too convenient.”
    “Then why not tell us what’s going on here?” said Happy.
    “Maybe they don’t know,” said JC. “A sign, perhaps, that our mysterious benefactor isn’t all-knowing.”
    He took off his sunglasses and unleashed his brightly glowing eyes on the fog. Happy and Melody turned their heads away, unable to look at him directly. It wasn’t that they were afraid of what they might see if they were to look directly into JC’s golden eyes, it was that they found the light too fierce, too unrelenting, for human eyes.
    “What does it look like, JC?” said Happy. “When you see the world through those eyes?”
    “Everything seems so clear, so simple,” said JC. “As though . . . everything finally makes sense.”
    “I don’t know why you two keep looking away,” said Kim. “It doesn’t bother me. They look like eyes to me. Nice colour, too.”
    JC took another step forward, concentrating on the fog. He couldn’t see anything new, but wherever he turned his gaze, the fog reacted. It seemed to recoil from him, churning and roiling violently, as though disturbed or agitated. When he swept his hand through it, there was no reaction, but he got the sense that the fog didn’t like his golden gaze at all. That perhaps . . . the fog was frightened of it.
    “The fog!” Kim said suddenly. “ It’s the presence!”
    JC nodded slowly. “Yes. It is. I’ve heard of this phenomenon though I’ve never encountered it before. Don’t know anyone who has. But I know what this is, what it has to be. It’s rare, very rare. Takes a lot of energy to produce and maintain, to make it even possible . . . This is ghostlight. Undifferentiated ghosts. This is what will become ghosts, in time. As the building calls the dead to it, they will form out of this fog, taking on shape and nature and purpose.”
    “Okay,” said Melody. “That’s all very fine and groovy, but what is it exactly? Are we talking ectoplasm of some kind?”
    “Spookier than that,” said JC. “What we’re looking at isn’t really water droplets suspended in the air. Our eyes interpret this as fog because that’s as close as our minds can get to understanding it. This . . . is pure potential, the raw chaos from which order unfolds itself.”
    “Oh crap,” said Melody.
    Dim dark shapes began to form in the grey depths of the fog. Row upon row of them, standing unnaturally still, stretching out wider and further back than the building should have been able to accommodate. Most of the shapes were human, or at least humanish. Others were larger, bulkier, distorted. And some were only abstract shapes, impressions of people, like nightmares given shape and form in the waking world. JC looked back and forth, trying to get some sense of numbers, and failing. So many ghosts, drawn there by the birth of the New People, and what had been done to Chimera House. Standing in ranks, as though