Ghostfinders 02 - Ghost of a Smile

have to earn it by our own efforts, one step at a time. Remember what you were. Who you were. What it felt like to be human. Small joys and small achievements are no less real for being small. Remember what you wanted out of life before chemical godhood gave it to you on a platter.”
    We remember . . . but only as a dream. A long nightmare from which we have at last awakened. But yes—we do remember.
    “You think all our junk DNA being blocked off just . . . happened?” said JC. “No. It’s there waiting, for the right time. For us to be ready for it. It’ll awaken itself when conditions are right. And then, and only then . . . we’ll all become like you. When the world needs us to be like you. Because by then, hopefully, we’ll have earned it.”
    The New People paused. They seemed to be talking among themselves, but it was not speech that JC or Happy or Melody or Kim could comprehend. Finally, they spoke again.
    Yes. This is not our Time. We are ghosts from the Future. That’s where we belong. So that is where we will go. Now.
    And they were gone. All of them, gone. The overpowering presence of the New People disappeared, snapped off, as they moved on into Future Time. Except . . . JC was always sure afterwards, that for a moment one of the New People, the terrible transformed living gods, dropped her godly mask to look back at him as the young woman she’d originally been . . . to give him just the ghost of a smile, before she left.
    The four Ghost Finders, the three living people and the dead woman, looked slowly around them. They were standing in an empty floor at the top of an office building in London, and everything else they had seen there was already a fading memory. The world was back the way it should be, and full of only those things that belonged there. And the warm amber street light falling through the glass windows was like a benediction.
    “That’s it,” said Happy. “It’s all over?”
    “No,” said JC. “This is over, but we still don’t know who or what Patterson represented. Why they wanted us, and what they hoped to achieve. Remember what those Crowley Project agents said, down under Oxford Circus Tube Station? That there are people operating behind the scenes, weakening the walls of the world, for purposes of their own . . . Nothing to do with the Project or the Carnacki Institute. We need to find out who these people are. Before they do something even worse than this.”
    “Could we at least take a day off, first?” said Happy. “I am so tired I feel like I could go into reverse.”
    “Of course!” said JC, smiling broadly on his people. “All work and no play makes Jack a pain in the arse. But still, you know, I have to wonder . . . what kind of world the New People might have made. Whether it might actually have been . . . something very like Heaven.”

NINE
    RIDER ON THE STORM
    Some hours later, outside Chimera House
     
    The night was almost over. The sun was fighting its way up the sky, pushing back the dark with streaks of red and gold. The shadows were no longer as deep, or as menacing, and a few of the more optimistic birds had started singing. London’s morning traffic was getting under way, the muted roar barely audible in the distance. It was still bloody cold, though.
    The Carnacki Institute had turned out in force to mop up the mess left behind by its latest mission. Dozens of people were running this way and that, up and down the street before Chimera House, all kinds of people, representing all kinds of specialities, all of them moving like they had a plan. Or at the very least, all trying hard to look busy so they wouldn’t get shouted at. Some were inside the lobby, taking readings with an impressive array of instruments. Others were already deeper in and further up, cleaning the place thoroughly, before the local authorities were allowed in. Removing all traces of the weird and uncanny, and any and all evidence that might give lesser mortals nightmares. Scientific equipment was being removed, computers wiped clean, and certain objects were being bagged up and taken away for examination, autopsy, or a quick trip to the incinerator.
    Everyone was moving quickly, hard at work, because the area had already been sealed off and isolated for far too long. People might start asking questions. Though the Carnacki Institute would have already seen to it that they wouldn’t get any answers. For their own good. The best way to keep a secret is to make sure