Voices From Beyond (A Ghost Finders Novel) by Simon R. Green Read Free Book Online Page A

signal. That television shouldn’t be showing anything.”
    “Somebody wants to talk to us,” said JC.
    “You say that like it’s a good thing,” said Happy. “I can’t believe there’s anything our interdimensional intruder would want to say that we would want to hear. Any sane person, with working survival instincts, would be sprinting for the horizon right now.”
    The professor looked hopefully at the door; but one glance from JC was all it took to hold him in place. JC looked thoughtfully at the television screen.
    “All right,” he said. “What do you want?”
    The screen cleared to show shifting, disturbing images from some awful hellish place. Another world, another reality, where everything was alive. Horribly alive. Lit by a flaring, blood-red light, everything in this terrible new world seemed to be made of flesh. The ground had skin. Corpse white and blue-veined, it pulsed and heaved, sweating fiercely. Great trees rose to make a fleshy jungle, with thick meat trunks and flailing branches, lashing the air like boneless tentacles, grabbing hungrily at distorted, malformed creatures than ran and leapt and scuttled through the dark shadows between the trees. Alien shapes, moving in inhuman ways, pursuing and eating each other; every living thing attacking and feasting on every other living thing. A world of endless appetite, of ravenous hunger, without any trace of conscience or regret to hold them back from every appalling thing they did.
    It rained blood. And the fleshy ground drank it up with vicious glee.
    The professor vomited, noisily and messily. JC patted him absently on the shoulder, his gaze fixed on the other world.
    “It’s showing us where it comes from,” he said quietly. “It’s not giving us a name, or even showing what it is, because it doesn’t want us to have any information we could use against it. I don’t recognise this . . . place. Melody?”
    “My computers are coming up blank,” Melody said steadily. “Nothing even like this, in all the Institute’s records. This must be way out in the Outer Reaches. The Shoals, perhaps, where the material meets the immaterial.”
    “It’s playing with us,” said JC. “Taunting us . . .”
    “Wait,” said Happy. “What’s that?”
    The image on the screen had zoomed in on the meat forest, to show four human figures running desperately through the swaying trees. They lurched and stumbled, avoiding the lashing branches and the leaping creatures. They looked worn-down and exhausted, as though they’d been running for some time. But the huge and horrible thing lunging through the forest after them, snapping at their heels, was enough to keep them moving. And though the dark presence was half-hidden among the trees, it was still stunningly repulsive and horribly powerful. The only reason it hadn’t already caught and consumed its human prey . . . was that it was having too much fun chasing them.
    “I don’t understand,” the professor said plaintively, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Is that their . . . souls? If those are their souls, how can they be in any danger?”
    “A world made of psychoplasm; psychogeography,” Happy said unexpectedly. “A world made physical by the thoughts and desires of those who live there. It looks like that because that’s what they want. The immaterial made real and solid by the intents of its inhabitants. Your students’ souls are real and solid, there, because that’s what the thing chasing them wants. They might not be able to die, or at least die permanently; but they can certainly be made to suffer.”
    The professor looked like he wanted to vomit again. He made a high, keening sound, his eyes stretched painfully wide. JC had seen that look before—on the faces of people forced to understand and believe too much, too quickly.
    “You were right, Happy,” said Melody. “It’s a Beast. And it’s hungry.”
    “Shit,”
said Happy.
    “Why is he looking so scared?”