Ghostfinders 03 -Ghost of a Dream

dress was soaked in blood because the woman didn’t have a head any more. Someone had ripped it right off. Blood had coursed down from the ragged stump, down the whole length of her dress, plastering it to her body with ghastly red stains. More blood had splashed across the open door, coating it from top to bottom. The woman stood where she was, in the exact same pose, as though she hadn’t yet understood the terrible thing that had happened to her.
    The fifth poster was the same wintry scene as before; but now the dark figure was running down the narrow lane towards her. Already it had covered half the distance, and something about it suggested the dark figure was approaching at fantastic speed. Legs pounding, arms flailing wildly, it was running right at Melody; and she knew it meant to do awful things to her when it finally reached her.
    By the time she got to the sixth and final portrait, again, all she could feel was shocked and numb. The way everything kept changing had knocked her off-balance. Kicked her feet out from under her. She couldn’t seem tofind her mental bearings. Every time she thought she knew where she was, it had changed. There was nothing she could count on, nothing she could depend on. The whole world had become fluid, unreliable, untrustworthy. Because if an image could change, so could anything. The floor might become the ceiling, her precious controls might grow teeth and snap at her fingers. Left could become right, and real become unreal. Sanity and madness could flip-flop, and you wouldn’t even know which was which. She looked at the image of the stuffed fox head; and it laughed soundlessly at her.
    Just like a dream,
thought Melody, as she moved slowly to the left, to stand before the first poster again.
Like a nightmare where everything keeps changing, and changing for the worst. Where sane and ordinary everyday things can become horrible and threatening, and there’s no safety anywhere.
    Her head was swimming, and it was all she could do to stand upright. It felt like the floor of the lobby was rising and falling, like a clipper ship at sea. She put out her hands for something to lean on, to steady herself; but there was nothing. She felt hot and sweaty, like a fever she’d had as a child, when it felt like the whole world might melt and run away. Melody growled suddenly, a harsh warning sound from deep in her throat. She was under attack.
    That realisation was like a splash of cold water in the face. She couldn’t trust her eyes any more. The world might not feel real any more, but that didn’t mean she was mad. It meant she was under psychic attack. There was danger close at hand; she could feel that very clearly.She felt that there was something she ought to be doing, but she couldn’t seem to clear her mind enough to think what. So she stared at the poster before her, studying the image with all her concentration as though she could make it behave through sheer strength of will.
    The young woman in the wedding gown had left the bottom of the long stairway and come forward to press her face up against the other side of the poster as though it were the other side of a mirror. She glared out at Melody, her face twisted with rage and an inhuman malice. Bloody tears ran down her distorted face from her madly staring eyes and dripped steadily off her chin. Her wide-stretched mouth now had lips the colour of dried blood, and it was packed full of needle teeth. She’d raised her hands and slammed them flat against the other side of the poster, the other side of the glass, as though she were banging against it, trying to break through.
    Melody wrenched her gaze away and stumbled off, to the left, to stand before the second poster again. The clipper ship was almost gone, only its pointed prow and the tops of the masts still showing above the raging sea. The sky was full of dark clouds and heavy, sleeting rain. The sea was full of sharks, and there were bits of men and long streaks of blood everywhere in the waters. As Melody watched, crimson-tinged waters dribbled down the lobby wall from the bottom of the poster, as though the sea was breaking through. Melody stepped carefully backwards, away from the bloody sea-water pooling on the floor at the foot of the wall.
    She found herself standing before the next poster. Thefour young dead men had emptied their glasses of blood and crushed the glasses to bloody splinters in their unfeeling hands. One of them had turned and sunk his