He stormed about the room, ignoring its other occupants and viciously cleaving the air with his riding crop.
The gaunt man continued to pace. The lavender woman, to knit.
Two schoolboys were suddenly playing with an old-fashioned clockwork train set. A crazy-eyed woman, naked but for a speckled band about her neck, danced a lunatic jig. A one-legged soldier with a yellow face hobbled in on a crutch. And then there were more and more and more. And the more and more moved into and through one another. Merging and reforming and blurring and coming and going. And …
It was all too much for Icarus, who suddenly found himself falling into that deep dark whirling pit of oblivion normally reserved for genre detectives who are beginning their cases.
He awoke in horror and confusion to find himself in a garden shed. Lacking Woodbine’s professionalism, the best Icarus could manage was “Where am I?” followed by quite a loud “Aaaaaagh!”
“Calm yourself, lad, calm yourself.” Johnny Boy looked down upon Icarus Smith. “You fainted, lad. I dragged you out here.”
Images swam before the eyes of Icarus. “Aaaagh!” he went once more. “It was ghosts. I saw ghosts.”
“One hundred and six ghosts altogether. I told you not to look.”
Icarus struggled to his knees and glanced fearfully about.
“There’s no ghosts here,” said Johnny Boy, doing his best to help the lad up, but not faring altogether well. “You’re quite safe here in my shed.”
“Your shed?”
“Well, the professor’s shed. But he lets me live here. Let me live here, that is.”
Icarus climbed shakily to his feet. The shed at least looked normal enough. It had the usual broken tools, the usual wealth of old flowerpots, the usual sheddy smell and the traditional half a bag of solid cement that all sheds seem to have.
Upon one wall, however, there was a world map, which looked slightly out of place, but other than that it was all safe shed.
“Bottom of the professor’s garden,” said Johnny Boy. “Beyond the hedge; you have to crawl through. I dragged you through. You’re all safe here.”
“But the ghosts.” Icarus sat down upon the half bag of solid cement. “They were real ghosts. I really saw them. I never believed in ghosts. But they were true. I did see them.”
“True as true, all hundred and six of the beggars.”
Icarus took calming breaths. “Too much,” he said. “That has to be the most badly haunted house in all the world.”
Johnny Boy shrugged. “Probably the same as any other. You just can’t see them, is all.”
Icarus shook a befuddled head. “I’m in a right state here,” he said.
“I told you not to look. But did you listen to old Johnny Boy?”
“No I didn’t,” said Icarus.
“No you didn’t. You’ve got a white face on you. White as Lady Gloria Scott. You saw her dancing nude, didn’t you?”
“You know their names?” said Icarus.
“Researched every one of them for the professor. They were all his fault, after all.”
“I don’t understand a bit of this.”
“No, of course you don’t. But I’ll tell you what. I can see that you’re not a wrong’un, so why don’t we do a deal? You tell me everything you know and I’ll tell you all about the ghosts. Oh, and by the by, I took the liberty of going through your pockets, so I saw the wallet you nicked.”
“I relocated it,” said Icarus.
“So did I,” said Johnny Boy. “But you can have it back later.”
Icarus sighed and shook his head. “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I know.” And so he did. He told Johnny Boy everything. About relocating the briefcase and listening to the tape and about what was on the tape and about how he, Icarus Smith, sought to find the Red Head drug and take it and change the world.
Johnny Boy now sighed and shook his head. “Those filthy monsters,” he said. “I knew they’d do for the professor. They came here two days ago and carted him away. Then they came back and smashed the place up, looking for his formula. I hid in here. They didn’t find me.”
“So they never searched this shed?”
“Don’t get your hopes up, sonny, there’s nothing hidden in here.”
“And you don’t know where he hid the formula?”
“I don’t need to know,” said Johnny Boy.
“I’ll find it,” said Icarus. “If it can be found, I’ll find it.”
“I just bet you will. Would you like to know about the ghosts now?”
Icarus nodded.
“Well,” said Johnny Boy. “It happened like this. The professor was walking home one night from the station and you know that little passage you go down that leads to Abbadon Street?”
“I do,” said Icarus.
“He saw a ghost there. He didn’t know it was a ghost at first. He thought it was just a little old lady walking in front of him. It was night and there’s two street lamps about twenty yards apart. She passed into the light of one, then into the darkness beyond. And he walked on, but she didn’t appear in the light of the next street lamp, so he hurried forward, thinking she’d fallen over, or something. But she hadn’t, she’d vanished. And there’s high walls on either side, so he knew that she hadn’t climbed over.
“Then it occurred to the professor that there was something odd about the old woman. Apart from her just vanishing, of course. Something odd about her clothes. They were wrong, see? Old-fashioned. She wore a plaid shawl and a waxy Victorian bonnet. And then he realized that she was a Victorian old woman. She was a ghost.”
“So he somehow got her here?”
“Don’t be stupid, lad. The professor was a scientist. He had a scientific outlook. He reasoned that if he had seen a ghost there had to be a natural, rather than supernatural, explanation and one that science could suss out. So he applied his not inconsiderable store of wits to solving the mystery of ghosts.”
“And he solved it?”
“Shut your face, lad, and listen. People have all kinds of theories about ghosts. Lost souls. Shades doomed to wander this Earth in search of justice. Spirits being punished for crimes they had committed as men. Arbiters of doom. Et cetera and et cetera. But what the professor had seen seemed to him so mundane. It was just an old woman walking along. Probably as she had done in that passage hundreds of times. And that was the clue he needed to solve the mystery. Repetition, see. When people see ghosts, those ghosts are always seen doing a particular thing. Just walking along, mainly. So the professor reasoned that what people were actually seeing was a playback of the event.”
“Like a holographic image,” said Icarus.
“What the holy hellfire is that?”
“Something I read in a science fiction book.”
“Yeah, well it ain’t that. It’s a playback. The professor studied the location of the sighting. He tried to work it all out. Was it something about the location itself? Was it to do with atmospherics? He worked away like one possessed. He was always like that. And finally he worked it out. This world we live on is a bit like a great big capacitor. It stores up energy. You can call it psychic energy if you want, but that’s just a word. Everything that’s ever happened on this Earth leaves behind a residue. Everything. Like you leave behind a scent that a bloodhound can track. Your ghost is just a recording of an event, which can be played back if the conditions are absolutely right. Are you following this?”
“I think so,” said Icarus.
“So the professor set to work to invent a machine capable of creating the right conditions. An electrical machine, because all people really are, when you get right down to it, all everything is, when you get right down to it, is energy. Electrical energy, atoms vibrating, that sort of stuff. The professor figured that all you had to do was tune into the right wavelength, create the right frequency, beam it at a particular place, create the correct conditions for the playback of a particular event to become visible to the human eye.