“Happy . . .”

“I can’t do the job without them, JC. I just can’t.”

“Want to try some of mine?” said Natasha. Happy looked up, to find her standing over him offering a slim bottle of pills. Happy rose slowly to his feet, staring at the bottle as though hypnotised. JC stood up beside Happy but made no move to interfere.

“Only the very best, for the Crowley Project’s most favoured agents,” said Natasha. “Something to make you feel like a man, or a god, or whatever else it takes to get the job done. Want a little taste?”

“Tell you what,” said Happy, licking his dry lips.

“You try one of mine . . . and I’ll try one of yours. No? Didn’t think so. Did you really think I’d take sweeties from a stranger? Typical Project agent. Even now, you can’t resist manoeuvring for advantage. We’re facing the end of the world, and we still can’t trust each other.”

“Trust is fine,” said Natasha, making the slim bottle disappear about her person. “But always count your change. This . . . is only a marriage of convenience. And you can’t blame a girl for trying.”

“You were never a girl,” said Erik. “You were born fully mature, and nasty with it. Probably shot out of the womb demanding a gin and tonic and a ciggie, and a gun that fired real bullets.”

Natasha smiled on him. “How well you know me.”

Erik sniffed loudly, and moved away to peer closely at Kim. He walked round and round her, studying her from all angles, careful always to maintain a safe distance. Kim let him do it, studying him coolly. Erik finally stopped in front of her, looking thoughtfully into her ghostly face, so close their noses were almost touching.

“Boo!”

Kim laughed delightedly as Erik fell back several steps. He pulled his dignity back about him, doing his utmost to look like a scientist again.

“Remarkable phenomenon,” he said, in his best lecturer’s voice. “Very lifelike. Astonishing level of interaction with the living. Almost human.”

“More human than you,” Kim said sweetly. “Nasty little man.”

Erik flushed darkly. “Why did you destroy my computer?”

“Because it offended me,” said Kim. “Better be careful, Erik; you offend me, too.”

Erik actually looked a little hurt. “You don’t even know me . . .”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Kim. She drifted forward, and Erik backed away before her. Kim fixed him with a hard, critical gaze. “The dead see many things that are hidden from the living. I know why you had to leave Vienna University in such a hurry. I know why Interpol chased you across half of France. Shall I mention the dog with two heads, the monkey that aged backwards, the pig with the added human brains that could say seventeen words in Portuguese? And you really shouldn’t have surgically reworked that homeless girl’s circulatory system, to make it more efficient. Such a mess . . .”

“Shut up!” said Erik. “Shut up! Get out of my head!”

“Wouldn’t go in there on a bet,” said Kim. “It’s not my fault you wear your sins so openly.”

“They weren’t all failures! I achieved things, important things! I did!” Erik was breathing hard, almost on the edge of tears. “Don’t think I can’t hurt you because you’re dead!”

His left hand dived inside his coat, but JC was immediately there, putting himself between Kim and Erik.

“Don’t even think about it,” said JC.

Erik swallowed hard and looked away, unable to meet JC’s gaze, even muffled behind sunglasses. He nodded quickly to JC, and to Kim, then hurried away to hide behind Natasha, who ignored him.

“If you’ve all finished butting your heads together, perhaps we could concentrate on the extremely imminent end of the bloody world!” said Melody. “We are running out of time, people. Quite possibly literally.”

“Sorry,” said JC.

He moved over to join Melody at her instruments and made a show of studying the displays thoughtfully, as though they meant something to him. If Melody wasn’t entirely fooled, she was kind enough to keep it to herself.

“Any clues as to who or what our Intruder might be?” said JC, after a while.

“Nothing definitive,” said Melody. “But it’s not just . . . something from the afterworlds. This is Big, really quite unbelievably Big. One of the Great Beasts, perhaps. The Hogge, or the Serpent . . . Bad news on every level you can think of. If I really understood what these displays are telling me, I think I’d be very upset.”

“One of the Great Beasts?” said Happy, incredulously. “That is way out of our league!”

“Speak for yourself,” Natasha said immediately.

“You’re not fooling anyone,” Happy said viciously. “I can feel your fear from here.”

“You feel me again without my permission, and I’ll slap your face off,” said Natasha.

“Children, children . . .” JC murmured. “Play nice, or there will be spankings. Melody, could the presence of the Intruder in our world explain why I was touched by the Light? Was I granted this new strength to . . . even things out? Give us a fighting chance?”

“Who knows why the gods do anything?” said Erik.

“They are not gods!” Happy said immediately. “Don’t use that word. Never use that word. Just because they’re so much more than us, it doesn’t mean they’re gods.”

“What difference does it make?” said Kim, puzzled.

“Because you can’t fight gods,” said Happy.

“We can fight things that think they’re gods,” JC said cheerfully. “Remember that being we encountered in the supermarket car park? Worshipped by generations of early Humanity; and we still kicked its arse and sent it home crying. Melody, could our Intruder be anything like that?”

“No. That was a much more basic, even elemental, force. Not coherent enough even to have a name or identity. We’re faced with something far more sophisticated. A single entity, or presence, that can change our world simply by existing in it.” She looked at Happy. “Spell the word god with a lower case, and it’s a good enough term for what’s down here in the darkness with us.”

Everyone looked at each other. No-one wanted to be the first to say anything.

“We are not equipped to deal with a Great Beast,” Happy said finally. “Let’s be real here, people. Outer Forces like that are so far out of our league we couldn’t even see the league from where we are. We’re ghost finders, not god killers.”

“What we need are better weapons,” said Natasha.

“Bigger weapons. First rule of the Crowley Project: there’s nothing in supernature that can’t be taken down with a big enough stick. Maybe if we combined our resources . . .”

“You’re seriously contemplating throwing down with a god?” said Melody.

“We’ve been known to kill gods, at the Project,” said Erik airily. “Sometimes we eat them, too.”

“You couldn’t even stand up to me,” said Kim. “And I’m only dead.”

“Confidence is fun,” said JC. “Sanity is better. We need a plan.”

“We need weapons!” said Natasha.

“You can’t fight the Great Beasts!” said Happy. “They’re as much conceptual as anything, a horrible Idea from a higher plane, downloaded into physical form in our dimension. You can’t kill an Idea. The best we can hope for is to pry it loose from our plane and send it home with a flea in its ear.” He frowned, considering. “And we might be able to do that. So far, all the signs suggest our Intruder is following the standard pattern of any haunting, building everything from and around a single focal point.”

“You’re talking about me,” said Kim.

“We don’t know that for sure,” said JC.

Happy ignored him, looking at Melody. “How far away from us is the Intruder, and please say lots.”

“Hard to tell,” said Melody. “If I’m interpreting these readings correctly, and I’d be the first to admit that there’s a whole lot of guesswork involved . . . it seems our Intruder has added a whole new platform to this station. A half-way place, where its world butts up against ours. This new platform comes and goes, not always there, or at least, not always connected to our reality. It’s the Beast’s lair. Home for its new physical form. For whatever shape it’s taken in our world. We can only access this new station with the Intruder’s permission.”