Ghostfinders 02 - Ghost of a Smile

identifying imprint. Each of the New People existed in more than three dimensions at once. They had length and width and breadth, and other things, too. Other dimensions, physical and spiritual dimensions.
    Happy couldn’t cope with what he was seeing, or experiencing, even with his shields in place. He dropped to his knees and vomited noisily. Melody crouched beside him, partly to comfort and protect him, partly so she didn’t have to look at the New People any more. She didn’t vomit, but she looked like she wanted to. JC understood. It hurt him to look at them, even with his blessed eyes. The New People existed in spiritual dimensions as well as spatial. The human brain wasn’t equipped to deal with so much information at once.
    And all the time, JC was thinking . . . Is this what we were meant to be? What we all should have become? Or is this what we were spared?
    Kim moved in close beside JC, gazing uncertainly at the New People. “I can’t see them,” she whispered. “It’s all just light to me. Why can’t I see them?”
    JC shook his head vaguely, then turned his whole body away from the New People. It didn’t help. He didn’t need to see them to know they were there. Their presence overlaid everything.
    The longer JC and his people remained in the new place, the more they saw. Contact with the New People opened their inner eyes, opened up their minds, to the noumenon—all the adjacent levels of reality, the worlds within worlds, or surrounding worlds, the interpenetrating and overlapping worlds that most of us are mercifully unaware of. All the places and all the things that exist right next to us, blessedly hidden from normal view. Because if most of Humanity knew who and what we shared this world with, they’d go stark, staring mad. JC had seen some of it before, through his golden eyes, but never as much as this.
    He shut his golden eyes and still caught glimpses of other places, other worlds, other dimensions, where life had taken on shapes and aspects far beyond the possibilities of this limited Earth. He saw two suns shining fiercely in a sick green sky, over a landscape that was always moving, never still. He saw dinosaurs with huge, distended heads stalk purposefully through stone galleries and massive tunnels, carved into the side of a mountain. He saw a dull red sun drop sullen bruised light from a mustard yellow sky, over man-sized insects that crawled all over a stone mound the size of a skyscraper, darting in and out of deep dark holes in its sides, intent on unknown missions.
    JC cried out, and put his hands to his head. He thought he said, Too much, too much , but he couldn’t be sure. His thoughts came painfully fast, idea upon idea, rushing through his mind, darting this way and that beyond his control, as he fought to understand and assimilate a dozen improbable things at once. Sudden sharp insights slammed into his head, insights into the nature of reality itself. Blindingly obvious . . . but he was never able to remember them afterwards. Or at least, not in any way that made sense. Except sometimes in dreams . . . from which he woke cold and sweating, crying out, gripped with a nameless horror.
    He sat down suddenly, and Kim hovered over him uneasily. JC gritted his teeth together, and concentrated on being the master of his own mind, the captain of his soul. And slowly, piece by piece, he put his thoughts back together again. And when he opened his golden eyes, he was at last able to cope with what he saw.
    And one of the first things he saw was Happy, pushing away Melody as she tried to stop him dry-swallowing a handful of pills from various containers. JC forced himself back up onto his feet and went over to Happy, who abruptly stopped what he was doing and let more pills fall from an open hand. He looked at JC and his eyes were wild, almost feral.
    “Guess what, JC? You were right all along! The drugs don’t work!”
    JC still stumbled doggedly towards him, Kim floating timidly at his side. Even with his renewed mental discipline, he was still seeing things. Great inhuman faces, with incomprehensible expressions, watching, watching. They seemed to come from all directions at once, and some things that weren’t even directions. Strange things moved through the air, filling up the spaces between spaces, like the micro-organisms that roil and riot in a drop of water. They shot this way and that, passing through things and people and even each other. And then there were