Ghostfinders 03 -Ghost of a Dream

smart, almost aristocratic, and very pretty, with bobbed blonde hair, innocent blue eyes, and a flashing smile. Whoever she was greeting, she was clearly very pleased to see them. So why did Melody think the woman in the portrait looked scared?
    The next portrait was a winter-time country scene. A long, narrow lane sweeping between two fields piled high with a fresh covering of snow. There were no other details. No trees, no stone walls to mark the fields’ boundaries, no animals or animal tracks to be seen anywhereon the fields. No snow in the narrow lane; only a beaten earthen track. And up above, a grey and lowering sky with a threat of thunder and maybe an approaching storm. Melody leaned in close. She could almost feel the bitter cold of that winter day on her face. And there, off in the distance, right at the far end of the narrow lane, a small, dark figure, trudging down the lane, toward the viewer. So far off he was little more than a dark shape. There was a sense of…anticipation about the scene. As though if you watched it long enough, something might happen. Melody slowly turned her head away and moved on.
    The sixth and final portrait was a close-up of a stuffed fox’s head, mounted on a wall plaque, set high on some anonymous wall. The fox’s head was huge, filling the portrait, depicted in amazing detail. Melody could make out every individual strand of hair in the russet grey fur. The eyes weren’t the usual glass marbles you’d expect to find in a stuffed animal; instead, they looked dark and alive and full of a terrible fury. The lips were drawn back on the muzzle in an endless snarl, revealing sharp, vicious teeth.
    Melody moved away and found herself back where she’d started, facing the first poster. She slowly turned around on the spot, still widdershins, letting the posters fly past her eyes in a circle. She didn’t even glance at her precious equipment. She only had time for the posters. What were they? What were they for? Advertisements, perhaps, for long-forgotten products? But if that was the case, why were there no words anywhere, no information, no details on the products the posters were promoting? Could they be…perhaps pieces of art, produced bypatrons of the theatre, donated to cheer the place up? No. Whatever these images might be, they weren’t cheerful. Melody didn’t like them. Didn’t like any of them.
    She was about to return to the safety and security of her instruments when she stopped abruptly and looked again at the first poster. Something was wrong. Something was different about the image before her. She slowly moved forward, drawn almost against her will, staring intently at the poster. The young bride in her wedding gown was now standing at the very bottom of the long, curving stairway. Not in the middle, where she had been. As though she’d walked all the way down while Melody had walked around the lobby, making her circuit of the posters. And the expression on the bride’s face had changed. She was still smiling out of the poster at the viewer, but now it was a hard and nasty, openly malicious, grin. Her teeth were broken, all sharp and jagged points. Her eyes were narrowed and fixed on Melody.
    Melody made herself move on, drifting almost listlessly left, to the next poster. To see if that had changed, too. And, of course, it had. The clipper ship was sinking. As though it had hit something, unseen and unsuspected in the time it had taken Melody to come around to it again. The sunny skies were gone, replaced by a raging squall. The masts were all broken, the sails split and torn, the rigging in tatters. The ship was already half-under, and uniformed sailors were throwing themselves into the dark and choppy waters.
    In the next poster, the four young men toasted Melody with glasses half-full of fresh and foaming blood. There were dark crimson stains on the rims of the glasses andaround the mouths of the fine young men. Their skin was the colourless pallor of the grave, and their eyes were dark and knowing. Thin, dead lips had pulled back in a rictus, revealing razor-sharp shark’s teeth. Patches of grave mould showed clearly on the formal clothes they’d been buried in. The fingers wrapped around the fine glasses were broken and split, from where they’d had to claw through their coffin lids to get out.
    In the fourth portrait, the woman in the butter yellow dress was still standing in her doorway, but now the door had been thrown wide open, and the