But why did it have to be here?
As he led the other three along the tree-lined avenues of Kensington in the rain, Sefton wondered if there was anything more than coincidence to this. The winter rain was pissing it down on houses that had flights of steps leading up to their front doors, and three different kinds of compost bin in their forecourts. Exactly the sort of place he’d grown up in. Just round the corner, in fact, was the building where his dad had used to rent the upper-floor flat with the roof garden. Sefton had regularly stood in his school uniform at a bus stop a couple of streets away, and been literally spat at by the kids walking past as they headed for the local comprehensive. That London accent they used, it was the same one his tormentors at school had used — and he’d ended up using it, too, as a way of life.
A bus stop. Waiting for a school bus. That connected to something very particular in his head. And now this case had brought him back here. It seemed that coincidence definitely should be part of this stuff. But if you started paying attention to all possible coincidence, finding meaning in everything, then you’d be fit for the loony bin. And that would be worse for them now than for anyone else.
The others were all checking their phones, every other minute, for news from the DNA databases. Sefton found the bus stop he was after and checked it against the website on his phone. Yeah, this was the one. The four of them managed to cram into the shelter beside two nannies talking in what sounded like Russian, and an elderly man in a dufflecoat that smelt of beer. The display showed nine minutes till the next scheduled service. But what they were after, if the internet was to be believed, would come along a couple of minutes earlier than that. There was no reason why they couldn’t try to see it at a whole variety of places, but here was special somehow. It was only here that he’d read about it actually appearing to other people. Who knew if having this ‘Sight’ would make it different for them? This would be a first experiment. . if this stuff could be experimented on at all.
On the bus itself was where everything had been worst for him. A small bunch of kids, who’d all found their different reasons to pick on the posh little black child, had built up complex narratives of abuse, rhymes, stories and things they’d make him do that were repeated many times a week for five years. Many different drivers had all ignored it. Hell is other people. That bus was the cauldron he himself had been boiled in, and that had made the UC.
He forced those thoughts out of his head and concentrated on the job at hand. He looked again at his watch. ‘One minute.’
They all craned their heads to look out of the shelter and along the suburban street.
‘It’s not due yet,’ said the man in the dufflecoat.
Sefton nodded in reply. Through the rain that was bouncing off the trees and floating across the street, there appeared shining ancient lights, shining too brightly while yelling about what was approaching. . and a grey shape, red faded to dust-coloured, was emerging, approaching faster than any vehicle should.
Coming out of the rain, a bus roared into sight. The number 7 with its final destination, Russell Square, indicated on the front, and adverts for Ovaltine and Guinness along its side. There were the silhouettes of a driver and his passengers. It was only the age of the vehicle which made it seem like a ‘ghost’. But it was obviously something to do with the Sight. Sefton took a quick look at the other people at the bus stop. The Russian nannies were looking straight through the bus and past it, as they continued talking, but the old man. . no, he wasn’t like that side-stepping bloke in Soho, because he wasn’t so certain, but nevertheless he had turned his head quickly as if to follow the movement, as if he’d just glimpsed something but wasn’t sure. Then he’d looked away again.
Not giving anything away, Sefton let his gaze follow the departing bus, glimpsing only shadows inside, through the entrance leading to the stairway at the back. And suddenly he shuddered at what he felt there. He’d had a sudden flashback to that dark warm void below him. Not that he believed in Hell — he was sure Costain had come to the wrong conclusion about what he’d seen — but he knew what it would be like for himself: a bigger bus, with more people inside to contrive torments for him. What would have happened if he’d raised his hand just now and requested it to stop? Where would it have taken him? Probably not to Russell Square.
He watched the bus vanish into the rain again, the cloud of water that had parted for it dropping like a curtain and filling the space where it had been. He had to grab hold of the bus shelter to stop himself shaking.
They found a Starbucks. ‘In June 1934,’ Sefton read from his laptop, ‘London Transport held an inquest into the death of a bus driver who’d been killed at the junction of Cambridge Gardens and St Mark’s Road, after he swerved violently for no apparent reason. Other drivers testified at that inquest that they had also had to swerve at that spot, to avoid a double-decker bus, a number 7 to be precise, in the livery of the General Omnibus Company — which had become part of London Transport the year before — which “whizzed out at them”, and then disappeared. These appearances happened at two particular times of day, there being a morning service and an afternoon one.’
‘So the bus driver that got killed didn’t stick around to become a ghost,’ said Costain, ‘but we just saw the ghost bus that killed him.’
‘My point,’ said Sefton, ‘is this. You hear stories like that all your life and think: cool, a ghost bus. But now we have to look at this stuff analytically. . a ghost bus?! The “ghost” of a motor vehicle? A public conveyance, presumably, which didn’t head towards the light, move on to join the choir invisible in. . bus heaven, the great terminus in the sky, where all good buses go when they. . I don’t know, break down, but instead is doomed to. . drive eternally the streets of Earth! How can there be a ghost bus?!’ He looked between them, hoping they were getting this. ‘There isn’t even any record of a number 7 crashing.’
‘There very probably would have been at least one death occurring on any particular bus route-’ began Ross.
‘So one death onboard is all it takes to make an entire bus into a ghost? Why not ghost houses where people died, or ghost hospitals? Every bit of London would be full of them. Listen, what about those ships you saw?’ He felt the risk of pursuing this, the risk of losing them with theory rather than the sort of factual detail coppers worked with. But Ross had said they should allow assumptions. And more than mere assumption, he was certain, he was starting to put together a working hypothesis. ‘They must have had lots of passengers on them but, in their case, as in the case of that particular bus, we don’t see any of those people sticking around to become ghosts. We see the vehicles themselves. Even if we agree that vehicles can “die” and come back to “haunt” places, one of those ships was sunk somewhere else! So what’s it doing on the Thames? We could find, if we wanted to search the bottom of the sea, what remained of the actual hull of one of those ghost ships of yours, haul it up, restore it to full working order and launch it here, and then there’d be the real ship and its ghost floating on the same river! How does that work? And what about that Jack thing I met? He’s not even a real. . person, or vehicle or anything that you might even think could die and haunt somewhere, he’s just an. . idea!’
‘You’re saying it’s not always about something that’s died and stays on here afterwards,’ said Costain.
‘But sometimes it is,’ said Quill, ‘like with Harry’s dad, or the kid that bloke at the football match was carrying.’
There was silence as they considered that.
‘That old fellow at the bus stop saw it,’ said Costain.
‘Yeah, he did,’ Sefton found himself pointing at Costain as if he’d got an answer right in a quiz game, and realized how patronizing that looked and lowered his hand. ‘But only for a second. . and that’s another thing. I don’t think this is about who’s got the Sight and who hasn’t. I think it’s a. . spectrum of who can see what, when and where. That place, for some reason, is where it’s easier for people without the Sight to see the thing. And then it vanished for us too. But maybe we could follow it and see it elsewhere. Or maybe we could see it all the time if we used some of those hand gestures.’