Page 94 of The Shop on Hidden Lane

“Something bad happened here a long time ago,” Sophy said.

It took him a beat to realize that she was in her trance voice.

Fifty

The trance had struck outof nowhere, the way it did when she was in her teens and coming to terms with the fact that she was stuck with a truly annoying talent. She had taken one step into the old laboratory…

…and fallen straight into the ghost world.

A terrible sense of panic and chaos swirled in the room. Most of the ghostly shadows appeared to be male, but her senses registered two of the figures as female. The secretaries who had been sitting in front of the typewriters, she thought.

Several people in the fleeing crowd ran for the door at one end of the room. A few dashed in the opposite direction and vanished down another tiled hallway.

The intense and disorienting visions threatened to overwhelm her. She seized on her crime scene reading skills to make sense of what she was witnessing.

“…The energy levels are too high,” she said in her other voice. “Amiscalculation. Shut down the machine. Too late.Too late.”

“Where is the machine?” Luke asked.

His voice came to her from outside the trance.

You can do this, she thought.

She felt the weight of Bruce’s body pressed against her leg. He watched her with his amber eyes. She touched his head and then she fumbled in the pockets of her trench coat, desperate for the chimes and mallet.

She found both and struck a clear, high note. It steadied her senses, allowing her to concentrate on reading the scene.

“The machine is not in this room but it is nearby. Some think they will find safety at the far end of the lab. Others are desperate to escape through the door. They’ve had very little warning.”

She struck another clean, clear note and rode it out of the trance. The adrenaline hit her bloodstream, but this time it was charged with the residual energy of the fear and desperation that had soaked into the floor and walls and ceiling so long ago.

She dropped the chimes and mallet back into a pocket. “We’re standing in the middle of an old disaster zone.”

“You said something about a machine?”

“Yes, I picked up that much.”

“Probably an earlier attempt to tap into the vortex forces.”

“Idiots.”

Her nerves settled back into what passed for normal these days. She reached down to pat Bruce on the head. Evidently satisfied that she wasn’t going to fall apart, he left her side and went back to investigating the room.

He picked up a scent almost immediately, dashed off, and disappeared into the hallway at the far end of the chamber.

“That’s the direction several of the people in this lab ran all those years ago,” Sophy said. “They thought they would find safety there.”

Luke went after him. “Stay close.”

“Trust me, I’m not going to run off and explore this place on my own,” she said.

They followed Bruce around the corner and down a short, glowing hallway. At the far end was a steel door set into a wall of thick glass blocks.

“Looks like a safe room,” Luke said.

Bruce plunked himself down in front of the door and looked at Luke with a triumphant expression.

“I don’t understand,” Sophy said. “Why is he—?”