Ghostfinders 03 -Ghost of a Dream

Shooting down past normal levels and into sub-zero temperatures that would seriously upset a polar bear. Melody felt a sudden nostalgic twinge for the old-style thermometer, with mercury in it, where if you didn’t like the reading you were getting, you could tap the thing with a fingertip until it changed. You didn’t have that luxury with an electronic readout. She was about to try hitting the thing anyway, on general principles, when the readout rose sharply again, all the way back to normal, and steadied itself.
    While Melody was still trying to get her head around what had happened, all her warning alarms went off at once. The sirens were deafeningly loud in the enclosed space of the lobby, and Melody moved quickly from one readout to the next, all of which seemed convinced that she was surrounded and under attack from any number of heavily armed hostiles. The short-range sensors were picking up guns, energy weapons, Objects of Power, and all kinds of dangerous radiations, while the motion trackers showed dozens of hostile presences, circling round and round her instrument station. As far as her defences were concerned, Melody was under attack fromthe walking dead, demonic forces, and bloody big aliens in hobnailed boots. The machines were going crazy, warning her about everything under the sun, all of them shouting and screaming for her attention. Melody looked up and glared wildly about her; but the lobby was quite definitely empty and utterly peaceful.
    All the alarms shut off at once; and a slow, steady quiet blessedly returned. All the short-range sensor readings were back to normal, indicating everything was as it should be. It was like they’d all suddenly lost their machine minds, for no reason. And then all the long-range sensors kicked in, lights blinking angrily all across the boards. Melody leaned in close to study the readings, and then shook her head numbly. As far as the long-range sensors were concerned, the theatre wasn’t there any more. It was gone, and the rest of the world with it. She couldn’t find a single sensor reporting anything: no physical readings, no energy sources, nothing at all. As though she and her ranks of machines were floating alone, in empty space. Melody looked steadily about her, but the lobby stubbornly insisted it was still there, surrounding her, and everything was fine. She stamped her foot hard on the floor to make sure.
    Bright lights were flashing everywhere now, everything kicking off at once; and one by one, the monitor screens turned themselves on, showing Melody images of things that weren’t there. Brief glimpses of other worlds than this. One screen showed the inside of some vast stone temple, from an age before any known history, lit by strange, phosphorescent glows from long creepersof moss, crawling slowly across the floor and walls, and draping themselves around massive stone carvings of long-forgotten gods with horrid insect faces.
    The screen next to it showed a dark, drifting, underwater scene, of some sunken city wrapped in seaweed and studded with pulsing mushroom growths. Strange, unpleasant-looking fish darted this way and that, carrying their own eerie light with them, while huge glass submarines glided past, full of hunched humanoid creatures made out of kelp.
    Another screen showed the theatre lobby, soaked and splashed with blood and gore. JC and Happy stared out of the screen, standing together, their clothes and flesh ripped and torn. They were both dead, but they shuffled slowly forward on broken feet, staring out of the screen at Melody with dark bloody holes where their eyes had been, their mutilated faces full of a terrible silent accusation.
    The monitor screens all shut down at once, showing nothing. Melody was breathing harshly and scowling so fiercely her face hurt. Either something was wrong with her instruments or something was very wrong with the world. And, since a quick glare around showed the lobby was still there, untouched and unchanged, it had to be her machines. She honestly didn’t know what to do. If she started running major diagnostics on everything, she’d still be here running them when JC and Happy came back to tell her the case was over. Checking them all for outside influences would take hours. Though that had to be what this was. Something from Outside was messing with her. First those nightmare posters on the walls, and now this. Someone was messing with her head, trying tomake her doubt herself, and now