“I hate being dead,” said Melody. “I can’t stand it. Everyone cries here.”

“They should have told us what it was like,” said Happy. “They should have warned us. They should have told us about the Houses of Pain.”

“You’ll be with us soon,” said Melody. “You won’t like it.”

“They keep a special place here, for people like you,” said Happy. “For those who betray their friends.”

“You’re not Happy and you’re not Melody and you’re not real!” yelled JC. He tore at the webbing with desperate hands, forcing a way through, leaving the figures and their cocoons behind. They stopped talking, but JC could still hear them crying. He fought his way through the webs to the end of the corridor, then it all went suddenly quiet. JC didn’t look back to see if the webbing and the cocoons had disappeared.

Kim moved on, and JC went after her.

Maybe it ran out of corridors, or maybe it ran out of tricks, but eventually JC followed Kim through a particularly low-arched entranceway and found himself on an unfamiliar platform. He stopped to get his breath and looked around, wondering why he felt so strongly and obscurely disturbed. He didn’t recognise anything. Not only had he never been on this platform, he wasn’t sure anyone had. Everything looked different, felt different . . . subtly alien, as though he’d stepped out of the world he knew and into some new and very dangerous place. It was a Tube station platform, but more like Oxford Circus seen through a distorting mirror. The overhead lights flickered, plunging this part of the platform and that into patches of impenetrable gloom. The station’s name wasn’t Oxford Circus. Instead, daubed on the far wall in old dried blood, was a single phrase.

There was no destination map, and the posters on the wall beside him made no sense at all. The landscapes and views were alien and unsettling and utterly inhuman. Houses made out of porcelain, horribly fragile and sickeningly gaudy. Hanging gardens tumbled down the sides of ruined office buildings, with long grey fronds twitching hungrily. Seas and skies of unknown colours, and the shadows of things passing by. The scenes seemed to shift and stir, sluggishly, as though the posters were dreaming.

Kim floated in mid air at the very end of the platform, rising and falling slowly, her feet dangling helplessly above the platform, her great mane of red hair streaming away from her as though she were underwater. Her eyes were fixed only on JC, and she was still trying to smile for him. He started slowly, cautiously, down the platform, and she stayed where she was, waiting for him. He stopped before her, still careful to maintain a respectful distance, and again they talked. In quiet, low, confidential voices.

“I’m remembering more,” said Kim. “About how I died. I was murdered, wasn’t I?”

“Yes,” said JC. “I’m so sorry.”

“Why would anyone want to kill me?” said Kim, plaintively. “I’m not anyone important, or special. Or at least I wasn’t. Damn. I can see I’m going to have to work on my tenses.”

“Everyone’s important,” said JC. “First thing they teach you, in this job.”

“You’re sweet,” said Kim. “JC . . . If all else fails, promise me you’ll find whoever it was that killed me. And make him pay. I never thought of myself as the kind of person who believes in vengeance, never thought of myself as vindictive . . . but I suppose death changes you.”

“I will find him,” said JC. “And I will make him pay for what he did to you. Whatever it takes.”

“I wish I’d met you before. There was never anyone special while I was alive. Never anyone who mattered. I was young, I was enjoying myself, and I thought I had all the time in the world . . . Was there ever anyone, for you?”

“No,” said JC. “No-one special. I guess I was waiting for you.”

“I think you’ve left it a bit late,” said Kim.

They laughed quietly together.

“I love you, Kim,” said JC. “A bit sudden, I know, but . . .”

“I know,” said Kim. “We have to say what we need to say, and say it now, because who knows how much time we’ll have together. I love you, JC. However this all works out. If nothing else . . . I’ll have one good memory to take into the dark with me. Do you know where we go, when we . . . go?”

“Not for sure,” said JC.

“Terrific,” said Kim.

“It’s all a mess, isn’t it?” said JC. “We shouldn’t be doing this. Our feelings make us vulnerable. The enemy will hurt you to get at me.”

“How can he hurt me?” said Kim. “I’m dead. The worst thing that can ever happen to me has already happened. Who is this enemy, anyway? What does he want with you, and me? What’s going on here, JC?”

“Damned if I know,” said JC. “But I’m beginning to think it may be more of a What than a Who. Can you see, or feel, anything? The dead can see many things that are hidden from the living.”

“At some point you’re going to have to tell me how you know things like that,” said Kim. “Hmmm . . . I seem to see, or sense, a whole new direction I never knew was there, before. There’s something there . . . but I’m afraid to look too closely. It would be like taking a final, irrevocable step, admitting I was no longer alive and limited to the things that only living people can do. I don’t feel dead. I don’t! I still feel human things, living things; and I’m afraid to give up on them because that would mean giving up on you, JC, and how I feel about you.”

“Then don’t do it,” JC said immediately. “Look away. Dealing with things like this is my business. I’ll find out Who or What is behind all this and make them pay. That’s what I do.”

“I love it when you sound all cocky and confident,” said Kim. “It gives me hope. Tell me . . . what does JC stand for?”

“Josiah Charles,” said JC, after a moment.

“Ah.” Kim considered this, for a moment, then smiled broadly. “JC is fine.”

“I thought so,” said JC.

“Why is life so unfair? Why did I have to die to find true love?”

“Life’s like that,” said JC. “And death, too, sometimes.”

From out of the darkness, at the end of the platform, there came the sudden thunder of an approaching train. It beat on the air like the roar of some great, hungry, beast. JC moved forward automatically, to put his body between Kim and the approaching train, to protect her. Kim giggled, despite herself.

“JC, sweetie, I’m a ghost, remember? I don’t need protecting.”

“Being dead doesn’t necessarily mean you’re beyond all harm,” said JC.

“What?” said Kim. “I’m not safe even now I’m dead? How unfair is that? And exactly when were you planning to tell me that?”

“I just did. Can we concentrate on the on-coming threat, please?”

“We will have words about this later,” said Kim.

“Oh joy,” said JC.

The growing roar of sound became too loud for further conversation, then the train slammed into the station. The compressed air blasted ahead of the engine stank so badly that JC actually recoiled from it. The train roared past him, dripping blood, as though it had been doused in gallons of the stuff, and behind it came cars covered in graffiti, daubed in fresh blood. Some of it was still running down the steel sides. As the cars slowed to a halt in the station, JC recognised some of the graffitied words, and he winced despite himself.

“What?” Kim said immediately. “What is it, JC? Do you know that weird writing?”

“Yes,” JC said reluctantly. “It’s Enochian. An artificial language created in Elizabethan times, so men could talk with angels and demons and spirits of the air.”

“Enochian? I never heard of it.”

“Not many have, and it’s better that way. It’s not a language for everyday conversation. The name comes from Enoch, the first city of men, according to the Old Testament.”

“Never mind the history lesson, sweetie. Can you read it?”