“You know the Boss,” said JC. “She only ever tells us what she thinks we need to know. So we can concentrate our minds on the matter at hand. But . . . I’m pretty sure she would have told us if there’d been any indication the Crowley Project were involved in the creation of this particular mess. Because it could have a bearing on what we might have to do, to shut it down. So, no . . . I think we can rule out bumping into any Project agents down here, on the grounds that no-one with any working brain-cells would come down here, into the middle of all this, unless they absolutely had to.”

“Good point,” said Happy. “Suddenly, I feel so much more secure. I may even do my happy dance.”

“Please don’t,” said Melody. “Some things are an affront to nature.”

“So, children, let us bend our talents to the matter at hand,” said JC. “All hauntings, no matter how extreme they may become, are the result of a single triggering event. Something specific happens to set everything else in motion. Identify, remove, or defuse that unfortunate beginning, disrupt the pattern, and the haunting will collapse. I don’t see why this mess should be any different, for all its apparent scale. So let’s find the starting point and shut it down; and then we can all go home.”

“You make it sound so simple, and so easy,” said Happy. “And you know perfectly well it never is.”

“Right,” said Melody. “Save the pep talk for new-comers. We know better.”

“Remember when we trapped the Hammersmith Soul Thief in a mirror, last year, then smashed it?” JC said patiently. “That worked out fine, didn’t it? We never heard from him again.”

“Well, yes,” said Happy. “But it still took me ages before I could look into my mirror without expecting to see him standing behind me, peering over my shoulder, and smiling.”

“But it worked,” JC said firmly. “Just like my brilliant gambit at the supermarket, this morning. We can do this, people.”

Happy wouldn’t look at him. “I wish it was that simple, JC. I really do. But there’s something down here with us, and I don’t think we’ve ever met anything like it before. There are . . . Things, Powers, at work in the afterworlds. Some Good, some Bad, some so far beyond us we can’t even hope to understand their motivations and purposes. Sometimes they help us, sometimes they interfere, and sometimes they send us down to Hell with a nudge and a laugh. It isn’t the ghosts we have to fear; it’s the things that make ghosts.”

“Happy, you really are a first-class gloomy bugger,” JC said affectionately. “You could gloom for the Olympics, and still take a Bronze in existential paranoia.”

“Everyone has to be good at something,” said Happy, smiling a little in spite of himself. “But don’t change the subject . . .”