Ghostfinders 03 -Ghost of a Dream

though the train had been born again in some strange, alien amniotic fluid. The stuff fell slowly and reluctantly away from the train, dissipating, giving up the ghost, unable to hold itself together in this new kind of world. The whole train smelled like rotting meat, like something that should have been buried long ago.
    The steam still issuing in sudden spurts from the cooling engine smelled bad, too; smelled wrong, unearthly, changed. The few sparks still jumping around the great steel wheels were odd and unnatural colours. The weeds that had choked the railway lines for so long, those that hadn’t been chewed up and thrown aside by the train’s return, now curled up and withered from contact with the great steel wheels.
    JC beckoned urgently to Laurie, and the old man hurried over to join him. He stared at the old steam-engine with fond, almost worshipful eyes.
    “She’s everything my old grand-dad said she was,” said Laurie. “He saw her go into that tunnel, you know, back in the day. He always said she’d find her way home again, eventually.”
    “Are all the carriages there?” asked JC. “Is anything missing? Is everything there that should be?”
    “Oh yes,” said Laurie. “But look at the state of the engine! All that…stuff, dripping off her! It’s a disgrace…What have they done to you, girl? You were a classic!”
    JC looked at Melody. “Any idea where the Ghost Caller might be?”
    “All of my instruments are shot, fried, and dead in the water; but if I had to guess, I’d say probably the baggage-car.”
    “Look at her,” said Laurie, softly and reverently. “Been away so long everything about her has changed. All the metals and alloys are different now…the wood of the carriages is rotting, corrupt. And what’s inside…makes my skin crawl. There’s more to this train thanthere should be. As though the whole thing’s alive…How can it be alive?”
    “How can you tell all this?” said Happy, staring at him. “I’m a telepath, and I’m not getting half of that!”
    “I can feel it,” said Laurie. “Can’t you?”
    Happy scowled at the train and said nothing.
    “If it is alive, it’s not any kind of life we could hope to understand,” JC said briskly. “Or would want to, probably. Question is—what forms of life might the train have brought back with it?”
    “Really not liking the implications of that,” said Happy. He frowned suddenly, his whole face screwing up. “And I’m picking up something really nasty, now. Not a Light or a Voice this time, a feeling…like sticking your hand into a mess of corruption. It’s the carriages, JC! Look at the carriages…Dear God, what’s happened to the passengers?”
    They all moved slowly down the platform, peering through the distorted glass of the carriage windows they passed. A strange light blazed through the windows, like the blue-green phosphorescence of underwater grottos. People clustered together inside the carriages, staring out at the world they’d come back to; but they didn’t act like people any more. Their eyes were empty, faces twisted with wild, inhuman emotions. Driven mad, every one of them, or perhaps beyond madness into something else, through being trapped for so many years in a place never meant for humankind. They beat and pattered against the closed windows with flat hands as though they’d forgotten what windows were, or what hands were for. They were all desperate to get out, crawling and swarmingover each other like oversized beetles, staring out at a world they no longer recognised, with blank, insect eyes.
    “What happened to them?” said Laurie. “What made these people…like this?”
    “The Ghost Caller,” said JC. His voice was flat and harsh, with rigidly suppressed rage. “It’s been active, Calling, all the time it was Away. The passengers in the carriages were all killed, either by the abrupt transition to the Other Place or because they couldn’t survive in the alien conditions they found there. But the Ghost Caller wouldn’t let their spirits depart. Their souls have been trapped in their dead bodies all this time, driven insane by horrors the human mind was never meant to cope with. These are dead bodies possessed by mad ghosts.”
    “How can you know all that?” said Laurie.
    “I seem to feel it,” said JC, a bit dreamily. “Don’t you?”
    “We can’t leave them like this,” said Laurie. “It isn’t right.”
    “Of course we won’t leave them like