Ghost has the start of a headache, the start of what she hopes won’t morph into one of her colour-soaked migraines. Even if this job doesn’t pan out, she hardly has the time to lay up in bed for a day or two with a cool washcloth over her eyes. She rubs at her temples. Squeezes her earlobes. Someone once told her that worked. Sometimes it does.
It’s been at least a quarter hour, maybe more, since she was escorted into the room by the tall woman with the artfully expressionless face and asked—instructed, more like—to take a seat. Ghost doesn’t reach for her phone to check her messages. She doesn’t tap her foot on the polished wooden floorboards. She doesn’t pick at the skin around her fingernails. She’s been asked to wait, and wait she will. Patiently. Visibly. She suspects that might be part of the interview. She suspects there’s at least one spy-cam somewhere in the room, feeding its sneaky live report back to whoever wants to see just how much patience Ghost is able to summon.
“More than you know,” she whispers through unmoving lips.
The room is half-office, half-library, and the ultra-tidy desk before which Ghost sits would be long enough for her to use as a bed. It’s made from a dark, reddish brown wood, most likely mahogany—most likely real mahogany, maybe even antique mahogany—that matches what she can see of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining the walls, as well as the rolling ladder in the corner, and the exposed wood on the pair of lion-footed Georgian armchairs over by the window. Their flawless, cream-coloured upholstery must of course be the result of more recent renovations; no way could such fabric survive the ravages of almost a century unscathed.
Still, the room oozes wealth. This job should pay well.
Ghost waits.
Ten more minutes pass before the door finally swings opens and a woman in a modest but finely tailored suit marches into the room. Her hair is steel grey, cut into a sharp, chin-length bob, and her fingernails sport well-manicured French tips. She looks exactly like the sort of person who belongs behind that neat mahogany desk and, indeed, behind the desk is precisely where she sits herself.
Keeping a few paces behind, the tall woman who escorted Ghost previously closes the door before taking up a position at the older woman’s side. “Ms Thurston,” she says, “this is Ghost.”
“Not your real name?” Ms Thurston’s eyes are a blue so pale they’re almost grey. She doesn’t blink.
Ghost shrugs. “Real enough for me.”
The older woman holds her gaze for a moment longer, then nods. By her right elbow, resting on a small stack of papers, is a polished green-black stone roughly the same size and shape as a boiled egg sliced in half. Ms Thurston picks up the stone and places it right in front of Ghost.
“Did you notice my paperweight?” she asks.
Ghost nods, not looking at the stone. Of course she noticed it, just as she noticed the empty in-tray where those papers had probably lain, sans weight, until five minutes before her appointment. Just as she noticed the Art Deco lamp with the inlaid mother-of-pearl shade, and the Montblanc fountain pen that likely cost more than a month’s rent in the crappy Marylebone studio where Ghost has been living for almost a year, as well as the complete lack of framed photos or uniquely personal items anywhere in sight. It’s her job to notice things. To see what others might overlook.
“Pick it up,” Ms Thurston says.
“I’d rather not.” Ghost doesn’t know why she refuses. It’s dumb, but she doesn’t feel like even looking at the stone too closely, let alone touching it.
“Please.”
Clenching her teeth, Ghost reaches out and takes the stone between finger and thumb, like it’s something dead, or worse. Nothing happens. It’s a little heavier than she expected, smooth and cool and polished so highly she can see her silhouette reflected in its surface, and now she really, really wants to put it down. The pressure in her head has intensified and she wishes she had a glass of cold water.
After a minute that feels like an age, Ms Thurston holds out her palm. Ghost drops the stone so quickly it almost bounces, but the older woman catches it gracefully. She opens a desk drawer and retrieves a small black bag—like velvet, but darker somehow, less lightful—then drops the stone inside.
“Our missing artefact is crafted from similar material,” she says. “I needed to know how you would react before we proceed.”
“Well, I won’t be asking for a free sample.”
She smiles, lips stretched thin. “In some people, it can arouse rather…covetous emotions. You, however, sat here for thirty minutes with scarcely a glance in its direction. A passing grade, Lavinia, don’t you think?”
Beside her, the tall woman nods. “I believe so, ma’am.” Her face has softened somewhat, relaxed, a corner of her mouth twitching upwards. Ghost reckons she would be the type to unravel delightfully after a few drinks down the corner pub, spilling crude jokes and cider until the early hours. Though she doesn’t suppose she’ll have a chance to find that out for herself.
“You’re not as old I expected,” Ms Thurston is saying.
Ghost swallows a sigh. She’s short and has always looked much younger than her age—she was being regularly carded well into her twenties; sometimes still gets asked—and turning thirty last month didn’t seem to magically gift her with the kind of face that signalled, hey, I’m an actual grown woman, please take me the fuck seriously.
“Is that a problem?” she asks, her tone carefully neutral.
“Merely an observation.” Ms Thurston pulls a large envelope from the stack of papers and slides it across the desk. “This is what we need recovered. It’s an artist’s impression, drawn from the memories of two people who’ve seen the object firsthand, albeit some time ago now. ”
The drawing gives Ghost the creeps. Sketched from three-quarter view, it looks like some kind of weird gargoyle, winged and crouching on a low pedestal, with an octopus in place of its head—if an octopus could have as many as a dozen or more tentacles writhing around its face. The creature’s two hands—paws?—are resting on its knees, with huge claws curving downwards, and its body seems to be covered in scales. The pedestal itself is covered in squiggles that might be meant to represent inscriptions of some kind, but there’s a question mark next to it. Ghost taps the page. “What’s this about?”
“One of the gentlemen described a plinth with sigils. The other swore the figure was carved without a platform of any kind, but with markings underneath.” Ms Thurston sighs. “They are quite elderly, you understand, in their nineties. Their recollections may be somewhat fallible.”
“How long ago did they see this thing?”
“Approximately sixty years.”
Ghost raises her eyebrows. “There’s no one else?”
“Anyone else who claims to have laid eyes on the artefact is dead. It has been missing for quite some time.” Ms Thurston leans forward, her hands clasped tight together. “Will you be able to find it, or not?”
In the corner of the page, the artist has scribbled 5”/12cm. At least the thing is small. “Can I keep this?” Ghost asks.
Ms Thurston glances at Lavinia, who nods. “We’ve made several high res copies, ma’am. Print and digital.”
“The original would be best,” Ghost says.
The older woman regards her silently for several seconds. “We will need it back, once you’re done.”
“Of course.” Ghost slides the sketch into its envelope. “So whereabouts is this thing anyway?”
“If we knew that, you wouldn’t be here.”
“I just mean, do you have a city? A country even?”
“We do not.”
“Okay.” Ghost gnaws on her lower lip. “You know I only find lost things, right? Not stolen, not given away and regretted, not belonging to someone else. The lost or forgotten, that’s my jam.”
Ms Thurston pushes back her chair and stands. “Oh, it is definitely lost.”
“By you?”
The old woman laughs. “Do I seem so ancient?”
“You might look, ah, younger than expected.”
“Touché, Ghost.” She extends her hand for Ghost to shake. “Not lost by me, no. But the organisation I run has a claim.”
The woman’s hand is dry and warm; her grip is firm. Ghost likes that, but still. “I don’t know if I can take the job,” she says. “There isn’t a lot here to work with.”
“You might find there’s more than you think.”
“I’ll let you know in a couple of days?”
Ms Thurston nods. “Lavinia will escort you out.”
As Ghost follows the woman past the bookshelves, she feels it. A faint, familiar twang in her belly, like an elastic band pulled tight. She pauses. There, somewhere there. She reaches out, runs her fingertips across several nearby spines. Twang. That one, the dark blue. Blue as the darkling sky, blue as the collar on a four-year-old’s first school uniform, blue as drowning.
“Was there something else?” Ms Thurston calls.
Ghost turns around, book in hand. “Maybe,” she says, returning to the woman still standing behind the desk. “Maybe something for you. In here, I think.”
The older woman glances past Ghost, making a silent exchange with Lavinia, no doubt. Then she takes the book and flicks slowly through its pages. When she finds the piece of paper, loose and lined, clearly torn from a spiral-bound pad, her face comes close to crumpling. But only close. She turns the page around, so that Ghost can see the little boat drawn in a child’s hand, its sail a bold triangle coloured in blue ink. “My grandson’s work. We were taking him sailing that weekend.” Ms Thurston clears her throat. “Quite the party trick, you have there.”
“I’m sorry,” Ghost says. “I didn’t mean—”
“No.” Waving her hand in dismissal, even as she turns toward the window. “I’ve been missing it. Thank you.”
Lavinia taps Ghost on the shoulder, ushers her wordlessly from the room and down the hall to the elevator. “Jesus,” she says once they’re inside. “You’re the real fucking deal.”
“I guess I am,” Ghost replies, noting as she had when Lavinia had brought her up, the lack of names next to any of the buttons. Just floor numbers. Her mouth feels dry, but at least the pounding in her head seems to be retreating. “Tell me the truth, Lavinia. If I’d been…what’s the word she used? Covetous? If I’d been covetous back there, with the stone, I mean…would I even have been allowed to leave?”
It’s an odd smile that quirks the tall woman’s mouth. Like a predator thwarted, yet somehow glad of it.
“But you weren’t covetous,” Lavinia says. “So you needn’t worry about that.”
In the lobby, she passes Ghost a business card. It’s white, with a capital L written in a fancy black script, along with a mobile number and—
“A Gmail address?”
“You don’t need to know who we are just yet.”
“Okay.” Ghost takes the card, tucks it into her back pocket. She stares out at the busy, oblivious street, waiting just a few steps beyond those glass sliding doors. There’s a question she wants to ask, even though it already sounds stupid in her head. For some reason, she needs to ask it. “You’re the good guys in this, though, right?”
Lavinia laughs. It would take a long time to get sick of a laugh like that, maybe even forever. “Seriously, Ghost? Who on earth doesn’t think they’re the good guys?”
When 3am ticks over and she’s still wide awake, Ghost kicks off the blankets and rolls out of bed. Half a dozen steps carry her to the cabinet next to the sink where she keeps the Chartreuse, and she swigs a mouthful straight from the bottle. It’s ghastly stuff, but she trusts it to give insomnia a solid punch in the guts. She shouldn’t have taken the job. It’s too weird, even for her, and she doesn’t have the slightest lead about the creepy little statue. Not even a whiff of intuition. She told Cassidy as much that afternoon, calling in while she waited out a sulky London shower beneath an awning several blocks away from her meeting with Ms Thurston.
You need to wrangle me out of this one.
They already wired a down payment. For expenses.
When Cassidy told her how much, as well as the additional finder’s fee she’d negotiated for successful completion, Ghost slumped back against the wall. It was more than she’d been paid for any job before, more than she’d been paid for a year of jobs. Cassidy had earned her cut on this one.
Still there, G? Want me to bounce it back?
Fuck, no. Tasting the folly in her words even as she spoke them. Tell them I’m in.
Ghost takes a second swig of Chartreuse and grimaces. Across the room, stuck to the pinboard above her desk, the sketch from Ms Thurston mocks her. There’s enough moonlight coming in through the window to illuminate the pencilled outline of the creature squatting—
—on the ground, head turned in her direction, tentacles writhing about a maw that opens—
Ghost blinks and takes a lurching step toward her desk, then laughs. The sketch is unchanged, the octo-goyle-thing still perched on its pedestal, looking off to the left through wide lidless eyes. She’s tired, running a sleep deficit she feels like she’ll never pay off, seeing trouble where there isn’t any. Maybe after this job, she can rest. Go somewhere there’s lots of sun and no lost things begging to be found.
go home
The voice a whisper more in her head than her ears, and Ghost swivels around to see a shadowy figure sitting on the edge of her bed. No, not shadowy—dark, as if no light can touch it, though she can make out the sheets tangled around it well enough. The figure stands, fluid and sinuous, taller than a human should be and thinner, willowy, one too-long arm stretching out as it slides a pace in her direction and—
go home
Ghost hears again, feels again, and she stumbles back as the figure unfurls its elongated hand to reveal a sigil glowing so bright it hurts to look at: an eye cold and fathomless, reptilian almost but no, not reptilian, not anything that belongs on this earth. In a breath, the figure is right before her, that impossible hand on her chest now, pushing hard—
go home
—and now she is falling, icy water closing around her as she struggles to find the surface, but everything is dark now, an utter blackness that has never known the touch of light, and her throat clogs with mud and silt, and still she is falling
—falling, awake with a jolt. Gasping for air, Ghost rolls over and promptly falls again, a short drop this time from couch to floor but the landing is hard enough to bruise. She lies there, blinking in the grey morning light for a few moments, before registering the liquid soaking into her shirt and the sickly-sharp smell of Chartreuse filling the room.
“Fuck.” Ghost spots the bottle under the coffee table, most of its expensive green contents now spreading over the floorboards. She rescues it anyway, wondering where the hell the cap wound up, and gets to her feet. The eye sigil is scorched onto her retinas and not even a tentative sip of Chartreuse can wash the taste of river mud from her mouth.
Go home.
Ghost shudders. Her phone’s on charge by the bed but her hands are shaking so much it takes three attempts to send Cassidy a coherent message. Need flight to Melbourne, Aus, she finally taps out. ASAP.
Biz or econ? Cassidy responds in less than a minute.
Business, Ghost texts. Tell Thurston I have a lead.
It’s only been seven or eight years since she was last here, but the city has changed so much Ghost has trouble fighting the dislocation that seeps in every time she takes a walk. Her sister still lives nearby, nestled into an outer, outer suburban housing development with her husband and two little kids. Ghost has called her, once, without letting on that she’s home. Jem would’ve insisted she come and stay with them and Ghost has a feeling it wouldn’t be good to bring this particular job anywhere near people she cares about. They can catch up when it’s over—if it’s ever over.
She’s been in Melbourne for nine days already, staked out in a hotel apartment just a tad more swank than she’s used to, and no closer to finding the artefact than when she left. It’s here, she knows it’s here, but really, Ghost is talking needles and haystacks with no electromagnet anywhere in sight. She’s been to the four addresses Ms Thurston supplied once the geography was narrowed down—places with some apparent connection back in the day, but all equally dead now. Three of them since demolished and replaced with new apartment buildings, the fourth a city shopfront housing a dumpling restaurant that Ghost has eaten at three times. Truly excellent gyoza, but nothing else of interest.
There have been no more dreams either, or visions, or whatever the hell it was that night in London, and no creepy voices in her head, and so she’s gone back to first principles. Grid-walking the city with a daypack slung over her shoulder, slow and methodical explorations punctuated with frequent pauses to press a hand against an old brick wall, or the lattices of frosted glass that served as pavement lights for the ancient basements below, all the while keeping herself open.
Listening. Receptive.
Of course, there are a million lost things bleating out their presence in a city of this size, most of them barely even missed, and none of them the precise thing she’s hunting.
Ghost’s feet ache all the time. When she needs a break, like now, she grabs an extra-large coffee and finds a shady spot down by the Yarra River to scroll through Instagram hashtags for anything that might twang. She can’t decide which is more painful—the blisters developing on her blisters, or the kind of artfully curated, perfectly framed Insta-lives that she will never come close to knowing.
#melbournelife #melbournestreets #melbourneyoufuckrightoff
The last mouthful of coffee is cold but Ghost swallows it anyway, thumbing through a couple more screens as she gets up and shuffles over to the nearby bins. A kid on a skateboard jags her elbow going past and she almost drops her phone, scrabbles to keep hold of it before it hits the ground, and—oh. Oh, there.
The girl in the photo is blonde and thin, gazing up in mock fright with one gloved hand over her open mouth, and hovering above her right shoulder is the sigil that Ghost remembers from her dream. That same quasi-reptilian eye, with rays or something fanning out around it—she can’t tell through the filter the girl has used if it’s a framed painting or mural or what. It seems to glow, but that might be the filter as well. The caption reads: Ever get the feeling your being watched?, along with #theeyeshaveit and a cascade of other hashtags, including the ubiquitous #melbournelife. The date is more than a year ago, but Ghost likes the photo anyway and shoots the girl a DM—hey, cool pic. where u take that? in melb now!!—before downloading the image and sending it off to Cassidy. Location needed, she tells her. ASAP.
Surprisingly, it’s the Instagirl who gets back to her first.
It’s a stained glass window, not a painting, a small semi-circle mounted above the door to what is now a rockabilly clothing shop in one of the city’s older arcades. And they’re not rays that surround the eye, but tentacles. Ghost is in the right place, almost. She can feel it in her belly, a faint but persistent tautness. She takes a photo of her own; straight shot, no filter. Flicks it to Cassidy along with the address. More info please.
“Coolsville, hey?” The woman in the shop looks like she walked right off the set of early-season Madmen, except for the brightly coloured tattoos adorning her arms and collarbones. She’s wearing red lipstick and a broad, infectious smile.
Ghost returns it, with interest, and steps inside. “I’m wondering if you can help me out.”
“Sure thing, baby doll. Whatcha looking for?”
“I’m researching a book, actually.” It’s a well-worn line but one that usually works. For reasons Ghost hasn’t been able to figure out, most people are super-keen to throw any number of minor favours in her direction if she tells them she’s a writer. “It’s about, ah, the weird side of Melbourne, the creepy stuff. A friend told me about this place.”
“Oh, you meant the basement. They took it off the tour a while ago.”
“The tour?”
“The Ghost Tour, you know. After the thing with that guy…”
“What happened?”
“He refused to leave. Like, screaming and wailing and throwing-a-tantrum refused. They had to get the cops in. Wound up in a nuthouse, I heard, but that’s probably bullshit.”
“Right.” She catches a nearby dress between finger and thumb, appreciating the satin texture. Black with large colourful flowers all over, a thin little belt above a voluminous skirt. Pretty, but not her thing. “So, you reckon I could see this basement?”
The tattooed woman pauses for a moment before checking her watch. “What the hell, this place is a desert on Mondays anyway.” She opens a drawer beneath the counter and pulls out a sign, hanging it on the inside of the door before ushering Ghost out and locking it behind them. Back in 10, mother hen!
“I don’t want to get you in trouble,” Ghost says.
“Yeah, because my boss is a total bitch.” Grinning, the woman stabs a thumb into her own chest. “Can’t get away from her.”
She leads the way down a narrow flight of stairs and into a dim corridor. After a couple of steps, a light flickers on to reveal a large wooden door, its timber dark with age but fitted with a what looks like a fairly recent deadlock. Ghost takes a moment to orientate herself.
“So, your shop’s right above here?” she asks.
“Yeppers.” The woman unlocks the door and reaches inside to turn on the light. “The landlord lets me use some of it for storage, since I’m not allowed to do much fitting out upstairs.” She rolls her eyes as she steps back, sweeping an arm in invitation. “Heritage issues.”
The room isn’t much brighter than the corridor outside, but it’s three times the size of the shop above, cluttered with old furniture and stacks of boxes. Ghost feels the twang as soon as she crosses the threshold. She bites her lip, clenching her fists so hard, her nails dig painfully into her palms. It’s here, the damn thing is here.
“You sense it, don’t you?”
“Huh?” Ghost turns around, on guard.
“It’s wrong, this room. No one likes to be down here for long.”
“Except that one guy.”
“Except him.” The women opens a nearby carton and starts pulling out shoe boxes. “Have a gander while I grab some stock.”
Ghost doesn’t need to go far. There’s a line of four filing cabinets on the far wall, drawing her in. She picks her way over and places her hand on top of the nearest, disturbing many years’ worth of dust. But it’s the next one along that really pings; her knees almost buckle as she leans against it, and the taste of muddy water coats her mouth. The statue was in the river at some stage, she can feel that, thrown into the silty depths only to be dredged up again by sheer stroke of luck—or perhaps not luck at all; perhaps it called out to be found back then, as it’s calling to Ghost now, here in this forgotten old cabinet with merely a thin sheet of metal between them. She tests one of the drawers. Locked.
“Careful, hon, you might get tetanus. All that crap’s been down here for God knows how long.” The woman jangles her keyring. “Seen enough? I should get back upstairs.”
“Actually, do you think I could stay here a bit? Soak in the atmosphere, jot down some observations.” Ghost flashes what she hopes is a shy-but-winning smile. “You know, for the book.”
“Yeah, maybe not. I shouldn’t really leave this room unlocked.”
“So, lock me in.”
“Seriously?”
“I’ve been in worse places. Half an hour?” She switches her smile up a gear, places her hand over her heart. “You can search me before I leave, if you need to; I swear not to take anything except notes.”
“Oh, I wasn’t implying…” The woman looks flustered now, caught in a possible faux pas. “Half an hour, okay?”
Ghost waits for a minute or so after the deadbolt thunks home before slipping off her daypack and searching through it for the small leather case she keeps her lockpick tools in. The filing cabinet dates back several decades and likely hasn’t been used in nearly as long, so it takes her more time than usual, and a lot more force, to work the mechanism open. Wishing she had some WD-40, Ghost finally coaxes it into turning. The first three drawers yield nothing of interest but there in the fourth, tucked behind some empty suspension files, she finds a small wooden box.
twang
Its edges are sealed with dribbled wax, once black, now crazing to grey in places, and about as heavy as you’d expect if it contained a small figure carved from mottled green stone. Ghost knows the thing is inside, knows it as much as she’s ever known anything in her life—but still. The thought of lugging it all the way back to London, only to have Ms Thurston shake her head: this isn’t what we asked for; did you even look?
Ghost takes out her folding knife. “Bad idea,” she whispers, even as she digs through the wax around the slightly curved lid. “Bad, bad idea.” She clears enough to wedge in the blade and lever it back and forth until—
“Fuck!”
The migraine hits without warning. Colours fracture and pulse in the centre of her vision, spreading rapidly. Her temples throb; a dull ache moves along her jawline. She needs to get out of here. Now.
The box is on the floor where she dropped it, and thankfully it isn’t empty. She stares sidelong at the contents, peering through the edges of the aura that will pretty soon be all she can see for a while, and breathes a shaky sigh of relief. The statue is nestled into a velvety cushion, and seems intact. Ghost has no desire whatsoever to take it out and check. Sure, it’s only her migraine that makes the tentacles around the creature’s face look like they’re writhing, that makes the symbols carved into its base appear to glow, but that doesn’t mean she wants to touch the damn thing.
Ghost closes the box and shoves it deep into her daypack. Her fingers have started to tremble and she drops the pick twice while convincing the deadlock to hoist a white flag.
“Focus,” she whispers. The colours have spread further; it’s like looking through a psychotic kaleidoscope. At last, the bolt slides across and she fumbles her way out of the room and down the corridor, keeping one hand on the wall as she climbs back up those narrow stairs. Slim peripheral vision is all she has when she reaches the top, but she manages to make out the tattooed woman striding towards her—or the flared shape of her rockabilly skirt, at least.
“Hey,” Ghost says. “Thanks.”
“How did you get…?”
The woman’s voice trails off as she backs away, backs right through the door of her shop as Ghost approaches, as Ghost shuffles past, down the arcade, touching two fingers to her temple and flicking a salute as she goes. “Don’t forget to lock up down there.”
On the street, the sun is too bright, the pain in her head throbbing, threatening to burst her skull into pieces. Trams rattle to a standstill at a nearby stop and Ghost makes her careful way onto the nearest in line. Any tram going north will take her close to the hotel, as long as she gets off in time. At least the colours are seeping away now, leaving in their wake the blurred and doubled vision that she knows will last an hour or two. She pulls out her phone and finds Cassidy’s number, which goes straight to voicemail as usual.
“Hey, it’s me. Tell Thurston I have it.” She swallows, a sudden surge of nausea rippling through her guts. “And book a flight to London tomorrow. I want this done and dusted.”
Fighting the urge to vomit, Ghost only registers the person who is sitting in the seat next to her when they make a grab for her daypack. She shouts, wrenching her shoulders around and trying the push the would-be thief away. He’s a skinny guy, but strong, and his breath smells of sour coffee as he leans his weight against her, rough hands tugging on the straps. Jerking up an elbow, she catches him somewhere soft and hopefully fucking painful, and he lets out a short grunt before punching her. Hard. In the stomach. Gasping, Ghost reaches out with fingers arched into claws, determined to do some serious fucking facial damage, but the guy isn’t there anymore.
“You okay?” someone asks and she nods, getting to her feet as the tram lurches to a stop. Her assailant is face-down on the floor, half-blocking the aisle with some dude’s knee in his back, and Ghost climbs past, slides through the other passengers who move aside to let her pass, even as they’re demanding to know what happened? and why? No one stops her, no one so much as touches her, and she goes as fast as her compromised vision will allow. Out of the tram, onto the street, squinting through the bleariness until finally she has her bearings.
Two blocks north, half a block west. The hotel. A quiet room. Ibuprofen.
Ghost shrugs her daypack higher on her shoulders, and hustles.
It’s cold under the water, a cold so deep, so biting, it’s almost tangible. Dark as well, but even so, she can see the slim, elongated figure swimming toward her. Swimming, or floating, she can’t tell. Can’t move either, can only wait, blood turning to ice, as it comes closer, closer, black against black, those long, long arms reaching out—
wake up
—and Ghost does.
Her head throbs and it takes several disoriented moments for her to realise the ringing she can hear isn’t just in her ears. Only one person has the permissions to bypass her phone’s Do Not Disturb mode, and Ghost’s stomach is already churning as she swipes to answer.
“Cassidy? This better be the end of the world.”
“Check your door, now. Via the peephole.”
Cassidy’s voice is clipped and strained. Ghost rolls out of bed and fumbles her way through the apartment. She pulled all the curtains before crashing but it’s still daytime outside to judge by the thin lines of brightness sneaking past their edges, which means she can’t have had more than a couple of hours’ sleep. No wonder she still feels like shit. Ghost presses an eye to the peephole.
“Cassidy?” she whispers into the phone. “Why is there a neighbourhood watch meeting outside my room?”
“How many?”
Ghosts counts seven people, men and women of various ages, some in office clothes, some dressed more casually, and two who look like they’ve just rushed over in the middle of a gym session. An eighth joins them, a woman wearing the hotel’s housekeeping uniform and brandishing a small card. A key, Ghost realises, as the handle turns and the door is pushed open.
“Hey,” she says, pushing back. “Do not fucking disturb!”
The door only opens a few inches before catching on the security latch, and a hand slides around, fingers scrabbling. Ghost thumps the intruder, hard, and they withdraw with a yelp. She slams the door. Leans against it.
“What the fuck is going on, Cassidy?”
“Hold on a sec, I’m patching someone through.”
“You’re what?”
There’s a click, and then that someone is on the line, their familiar British voice shouting over too much background noise. “Ghost, can you hear me?”
“Lavinia?”
“You need to leave now. Take the essentials and get out of there.”
The door is opened again and this time two arms force their way through the gap, frantically grasping at empty air, while others outside pound on the heavy wood. Down the hall, an ear-splitting siren begins to blare a strident warning.
Ghost heads back to the bedroom, pressing the phone close against her head. “Is that a fire alarm?”
“Get to the pool deck. Fast as possible.”
“Yeah, if there’s a fire, I don’t think the pool will help.” She wrenches opens a curtain, blinking against the sudden light, and looks around for her jeans, her shoes.
“There’s no fire, trust me. And the pool is on the roof. Stairs are down the corridor to your right as you leave your room.”
“There’s the small matter of the walking dead, Lavinia.”
“They’re not zombies, they’re covetous. Figure it out.”
The call cuts off. Fuck. Ghost dresses at breakneck speed. Snatches her daypack from the chair where she left it and makes a hasty check. Passport. Wallet. Box from the Watery Depths of Hell. As she jogs past the kitchenette, she grabs the small fire extinguisher from the wall near the stove. There are four different arms poking around the edge of the door now. She gives them all a bash with the base of the extinguisher until they retreat, then shuts the door so she can unhook the latch.
Ghost takes a deep breath.
Pulls the safety pin on the extinguisher.
And swings the door wide.
The chemical powder drives the milling hoard back far enough for her to make a run for it. She lets loose another lengthy backward spray as she sprints down the hall. Beneath the siren’s bellow, she can hear coughing and spluttering, a confusion of voices that, for now, don’t seem to be following her. Half way up the first flight of stairs—thank all the unknown gods that she took an apartment only three floors from the top—she bumps into a handful of bedraggled pool-siders coming down.
“You’re going the wrong way,” a guy, wide-eyed, yells in passing.
Ghost grins. “Forgot my towel!”
At the top, she pauses to get her bearings, and her breath. The fire stairs have brought her out at the end of the hall that leads to the pool deck, accessed through a pair of solid glass doors. She checked out the place on her first day and dismissed it as being of any interest. Out in the open with a spectacular view, but no shade sails or any other way to hide from the harsh summer sun, and full of people generally being people.
It’s deserted now, though hardly peaceful, what with the alarms still shrieking at high pitch. A pair of sunglasses left on one of the empty deckchairs sounds a small, terrified twang. They belong to Wrong Way Guy. Ghost hopes he gets them back. She finds a couple of damp towels and knots them together. Threads them through the D-shaped steel handles on the glass doors and ties off. They won’t last too long against a sustained effort to get through, but it’s the best she can do right now. At a loss, she slumps down in the slim shadow of a nearby potted palm, and pulls out her phone.
Cassidy answers on the first ring. “G, are you safe?”
“My poolside cocktail is missing but apart from that—what the fuck is going on?”
“You didn’t read any of my emails?”
“I’ve been sleeping off a migraine since I got back to the hotel.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Don’t start with me, Cassidy. I’ve had—”
“No, I mean, it really sounds right. That thing you found, it’s not…it’s not exactly what Thurston thought it was. It’s worse. Or stronger—they weren’t precisely clear.”
“Cassidy…”
“The problem was, you stayed in one place too long. It’s like a beacon, Lavinia said. It calls out, but it needs to be stationary for anyone to get a fix on it.”
“It was pretty damn stationary down in that basement all those years.”
“Did you break a containment ward?”
“What? No, I just…oh. Like a wax seal, maybe?”
“More than likely.”
“No one said anything about fucking wards. This is some kind of slippery bullshit—”
“Agreed. Though they did seem genuinely sorry about it all; we should be able to negotiate a bonus. Undisclosed risks, and so on.”
The fire alarm has finally been switched off. In the shiny new silence, Ghost can hear the squeak of heavy doors being rattled on their hinges. She peeks around the edge of the pot. Her stomach sinks. “Cassidy, my fan club has caught up. They might even have recruited a couple new members.”
“Lavinia is less than a minute away.”
“She’s in the hotel?”
“Not quite.”
And now Ghost can hear something else. A faint thwop-thwop-thwop in the air, growing louder and louder, closer and closer, a sound she can almost feel in her ribs. She gets to her feet, runs past the doors where a dozen or so people are pressing themselves against the glass, their mouths opening wide as they spot her, and around to the other side of the pool and the five foot concrete wall that surrounds the deck.
A helicopter rises up, bringing with it churning winds so strong they almost blow Ghost over. The side door is open, Lavinia crouched at its edge, dressed in tactical black. She waves, motioning for Ghost to move away, then drops down a ladder. Chains clatter against the wall. It doesn’t look in the least bit stable. Ghost steps even further away.
“Cassidy,” she yells into the phone. “You and me are gonna have words.”
If there’s an answer, she can’t hear it.
Lavinia is also shouting something. She gestures toward the ladder, then points over Ghost’s shoulder. Ghost turns to see that her unwanted entourage have worked enough slack into the knotted towels to make a sizeable gap between the doors. A lithe, lycra-clad cyclist is trying to push her way through. A man in a high-vis vest is sawing at the white fabric with a knife.
A big knife.
Ghost puts away her phone and reaches for the ladder.
The trick is not to remember that she’s thirty-odd storeys above the unforgiving bitumen and concrete of William Street.
The trick, when her foot slips for the second time and she clings to her current position with eyes squeezed shut and heart pounding even louder than her head, is not to think of how few seconds she’ll have to regret everything she’s done in the last twenty-four hours.
The trick is to want nothing more than the very next rung.
In the end, it happens quicker than a jump-cut action scene. Lavinia, grabbing her beneath the arms, hauling her up. Pulling off the daypack. Fastening her into a harness. Slamming a headset over her ears. Sliding the door shut as the helicopter banks away.
“It’s in there?” Lavinia points toward the pack. Her voice, through the headphones, sounds ridiculously far away.
Ghost nods. Her mouth feels too dry for words right now. The woman unzips the daypack with gloved hands and reaches gingerly inside, like she half-expects something to bite. She brings out the wooden box, more of the wax flaking off at her touch, and raises an eyebrow. Ghost nods again. Lavinia takes a folded cloth from one of her jacket’s many pockets—the same lush, impossibly black fabric that swallowed Ms Thurston’s paperweight—and uses it to slowly, methodically wrap up the box.
Almost immediately, Ghost feels her headache lessen, the pressure in her skull ease, if only slightly.
Lavinia places her newly wrapped package into a heavy-duty metal box by her feet and spins the combination that locks it. Then she calmly retrieves a paper bag from another pocket, flaps it open, and vomits inside.
“Sorry,” she says, once she’s done.
Ghost shrugs. “I’ve seen worse.”
“No, I mean—I’m sorry.” Lavinia kicks the metal box.
“Oh. Well. At least you managed to come through.” She swallows, wishing she had some water. “How did you manage it, though? A flight from London is well over twenty hours…” The tall woman is smiling. Ghost wonders if she should mention the smear of vomit on her cheek. Decides to leave it be. “You were in Melbourne the whole time. Spying on me?”
“Watching. There’s a difference.”
“You’re gonna have to buy me a cider when we get back, and explain just what that difference is.”
Lavinia laughs and extends her right hand. “You have a deal, Ghost.” Her grip is strong. Safe. Ghost doesn’t want to ever let go.
This time, Ms Thurston is already behind her desk as Ghost follows Lavinia into the older woman’s office. Ghost has been in London for three days and has spent the greater part of those, as she had on the private flight over, sleeping the sleep of the jetlagged dead. Once the dregs of her migraine wore off, she skimmed through the curious, but now largely useless, info that Cassidy had sent her in Melbourne.
A secretive society of overly ambitious young men who, in the first half of the twentieth century, had headquartered themselves in the building where Ghost eventually located the statue.
Rumours of strange rituals. A sudden and unexplained death.
Elder gods. Elder gods?
At that point, too exhausted to countenance such long-dead conspiracies, Ghost stopped reading.
Ms Thurston gestures for her to take a seat. “We are so very grateful for what you accomplished, and so very sorry that we weren’t in a position to better prepare you. I trust the payment has come through by now?”
It had. Cassidy had texted her that morning about the unexpectedly higher sum. There had been several exclamation marks, and a dancing emoji.
“Lavinia still owes me a cider,” Ghost says.
“I’m sure she will make good on that.”
Lavinia doesn’t smile exactly, but the corner of her mouth does twitch. “I fully intend to, ma’am. Just been a bit busy of late.”
“Ah, yes.” Ms Thurston picks up the large cardboard tube that’s been sitting by her elbow and prises off one of the end caps. “As you know, the job you did for us wasn’t quite what we thought. Locating the artefact was merely intended to be a trial run, a test of your abilities…and your fortitude.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, fortitude wise.”
“Not at all, Ghost. The stone from which it was carved has a very particular origin. Some people desire it; others—like yourself, like our dear Lavinia—are repelled. Most are neutral, though able to be swung one way or the other, in the right circumstances. We suspected that the artefact, being an idol, would enhance these effects. We didn’t know that it had been amplified even further—a blessing of some kind, or a curse; we’re still investigating.”
Ghost folds her arms over her chest. “You don’t need to tell me any of this.”
“It’s only fair that you be given all pertinent information this time.” Ms Thurston extracts a yellowed roll of paper from the tube.
“This time?”
“There’s one more job we’d like you to do for us.”
“Is this one going to get me killed?”
“Possibly. But it’s for a very, very good cause.”
Carefully, the older woman unrolls the paper, which Ghost now sees is actually more like parchment, thick and creased and discoloured, and spreads it out on the desk. There are words in a language that Ghost doesn’t understand, that she doesn’t think anyone human is meant to understand, along with drawings that resemble the work of a deranged cartographer, and several scribbled annotations in English.
In the top right corner of page is one word: R’YLEH.
Ghost doesn’t feel so good. Her mouth tastes of salted water, cold and unfathomably deep. She glances at Lavinia, who offers a barely perceptible shrug.
Who on earth doesn’t think they’re the good guys?
Ms Thurston leans forward. “Tell me, Ghost. What are your feelings about finding a lost city?”