Ghostfinders 03 -Ghost of a Dream

remaining to show that the awful thing had ever been there. Lissa giggled suddenly, and perhaps a bit hysterically.
    “My agent is so going to hear about this…”
    Elizabeth looked hard at her, and Lissa turned her back on Elizabeth. JC joined Benjamin and Elizabeth.
    “Did that figure mean anything to you?” he said.
    “No,” said Benjamin. “Nothing.”
    “Then why did it point to you two?” Lissa said loudly, having moved some distance away. “Why did it pointonly at you? What do you know that you’re not telling the rest of us? You’re the ones who’ve got a history with this theatre! What did you do here, twenty years ago?”
    “This is nothing to do with us!” Elizabeth said sharply. “Nothing!”
    Happy moved in quietly beside JC. “The figure may be gone, but I’m still getting that strong sense of
presence
. Something’s still here with us.”
    JC scowled about him, frustrated. “I hate it when there’s nothing solid to get a grip on, literally or metaphorically. But it does seem to me that a lot of what’s been happening here doesn’t mean anything. As though…we’re stuck in the middle of someone else’s game.”
    “Unfinished business?” said Melody.
    “Almost certainly,” said JC.
    “Doesn’t this all strike you as more…dramatic than anything the renovators described?” said Melody.
    “As though it was saving the best stuff for us,” said Happy.
    “Or some of us,” said JC. “The question has to be, who is this aimed at, us, or the civilians?”
    “I need my instruments,” said Melody.
    “There must be something, something specific, in this building that’s powering this haunting,” said JC. “Something must have happened here, and in a sense is still happening, to make this theatre a bad place.” He looked steadily at Benjamin and Elizabeth. “Has there ever been a murder in this theatre? Or perhaps some major accident? A fire? Some sort of catastrophe?”
    “No,” said Elizabeth, immediately.
    “Nothing at all,” said Benjamin.
    “Right!” said JC, clapping his hands together hard, then rubbing them briskly. “I have had enough of this. We need to split up and search this place thoroughly. See if we can find Old Tom, see if he’s behind any of this…And see if anyone else has got into the building. If not, we need to turn this place upside down and shake it to see what falls out. Search everywhere, people, for something that will make sense of all this. Presumably, we’ll know it when we see it. Come along, my children, we need clues, we need evidence. Happy, you go with Benjamin and Elizabeth. Look after them and try very hard to keep them alive.”
    “Who, me?” said Happy.
    “Lissa, you stick with me,” said JC. “Melody, I want you back in the lobby. Fire up your equipment and scan this whole building to within an inch of its life.”
    “You do know,” said Lissa, “that in nearly every horror movie, when people split up and go off in different directions, it nearly always turns out to be a really bad idea?”
    “Ah,” said JC. “But I and my associates are professional supernatural arse-kickers, and very experienced in these matters. We don’t take any shit from the Hereafter.”
    “I want to go home,” said Happy.

FIVE

STARDUSTY MEMORIES
    Happy stood alone at the edge of the stage, looking out over the vast and empty auditorium. As someone who mostly preferred not to be noticed, even by the people he was working with, the whole concept of standing on a stage and being stared at by an audience made no sense to him at all. He’d never even been to a theatre to watch a play. Or a cinema. Happy didn’t like crowds, even when he was part of one. It was hard enough keeping the voices outside his head under normal conditions. Put too many people together in one place, and it was like the whole world wanted to force their way into Happy’s thoughts.
    On the few occasions when he did let his mental defences down, to look on the hidden world and all it contained, then reality became a very crowded thing indeed. With no room in it at all for a small, unhappy thinglike him. It’s one thing to know the world is infinite and quite another to be able to see it for yourself. Happy only had an ego as a form of self-defence, so the idea that someone could give a damn about him, like JC…or perhaps even love him, like Melody…was a whole new concept to him. Happy worried that if people could notice him, then maybe the whole hungry