“And that was at the university, right?”

  “Edna Vincent was one of the finest researchers the world has ever known,” he went on. “Blackwych Grange. Shapley Hall. Ashbyrn House. Crowford School. Even Hadlow House. She investigated them all over the years, to varying degrees. She always used to talk about the dream of proving that ghosts were real, about lifting that veil between life and death. For her, that was the most important crusade in life. She used to argue that we could never truly understand life if we didn't know what comes next.”

  “Sounds... spooky,” she said cautiously.

  “Don't use words like that.”

  “Sorry.”

  She waited for a response, but now he was sinking back into silence. She debated whether to let him fester there, but she knew that getting any kind of emotional response out of the great Doctor Crowman Mancrow was hard work, and she felt as if she needed to take advantage of the moment.

  “And you went on some of those investigations with her?”

  “A few,” he replied. “By the time I showed up as a young student, the unit was already shutting down. I arrived at the tail end of Edna's time, so to speak. By that point she was organising her papers and mostly involved in correspondence with other investigators around the country. Rebecca and Jonathan Pearson, people like that.”

  “Who?”

  “Long story. Nice people, though. Shame about what happened to them. That reminds me, though. I must respond to Rose's letter.”

  Another pause.

  “There was a kind of sadness about Edna,” he added, “a kind of... acceptance that her life's work was going to remain incomplete.”

  “That must have sucked,” Jenny suggested, although she instantly berated herself for using that kind of language. Crowman had insisted over the years that she had to be less emotional while she was at work. “I mean... it must have been disappointing.”

  “She started drinking heavily,” Crowman explained. “I don't know why, but I felt the need to help her. I was young and naïve, but she was my hero and I hated seeing her in that state. Which is why, I suppose, the pair of us eventually came up with our little plan.” He watched Edna's dead face for a moment longer before looking up at Jenny, and for the first time there was a hint – just a small hint – of tears in his eyes. “The very plan that we're embarking upon tonight.”

  The penguin timer was down to eleven minutes now.

  ***

  Twenty years earlier...

  “Oh what a load of bollocks,” Edna Vincent muttered, stepping around her overcrowded desk and struggling even with this simple task. Holding a glass of red wine in one hand, she reached down to steady herself, and in the process she knocked some papers onto the floor. “Now look what you've made me do.”

  “I'll pick those up,” Crowman said, hurrying over and crouching down to gather the papers.

  “Why?” she barked. “Because you think I'm too old?”

  “I just... wanted to be nice.”

  With the papers in his hands, he got to his feet – and now he found himself uncomfortably close to his mentor, staring into her eyes from just a foot or so away.

  “I'm sixty-three years old,” she told him, “not a hundred and sixty-three.”

  She snatched the papers from his hand and set them back on the desk, although Crowman couldn't help but notice that she had now placed them down in a completely different spot and at the top of a completely different pile. For his ordered brain, which prized strict rules over almost everything else, that was a nightmare. He made a note to set everything right next time her back was turned.

  “You're going to have to find yourself someone else to run around after,” she continued with a smear of red wine on her lips. “I'm done. Finished. My goose is cooked.”

  “Just because the university is letting you go,” he replied, “doesn't mean that your work has to come to an end.”

  “Of course it bloody does,” she said, turning and heading back around to the other side of her desk. “I can't afford to go swanning around looking at haunted houses on my own dime. Money doesn't grow on trees, you know.”

  “I know, but -”

  “And it's not like I've saved much up over the years,” she added, slumping down onto her office chair, which creaked accordingly beneath her weight. “Every penny went straight back into my work. My books on the subject of supernatural research have barely sold. Most people look at me as if I'm some old kook.”

  “I don't think anybody seriously thinks that,” he replied.

  “Oh, they do,” she muttered darkly, before finishing her glass and immediately starting to pour another. “You'll get the same treatment too if you keep on with this line of work. My advice, Crowman, is to give it all up. Find a more respectable avenue for your intellectual dalliances.”

  “But -”

  “Don't make the same mistakes that I've made. Maybe no-one can ever prove that ghosts are real. Maybe that's the whole bloody point. They'll always remain tantalisingly out of reach.”

  “Are you starting to doubt that they exist?”

  “Of course not,” she said with a sigh, shaking her head. “Didn't you listen to a word that just came out of my mouth? I know they're real, I just can't prove it.”

  “What if...”

  He paused, and after a moment he found that the slightest vague notion of an idea had arrived fully-formed in the back of his mind. He told himself that he had no right to contradict the great Professor Edna Vincent, that any idea he concocted was surely just something she must have dismissed many years earlier. At the same time, he wanted to help and he figured that he had to at least try.

  “What if we've just been coming at this from the wrong angle,” he asked finally.

  “What are you talking about?” she snapped.

  “I'm talking about the ultimate experiment,” he went on. “The ultimate study of ghosts. Think about it, you've spent your entire career trying to obtain proof of their existence. Photographs. Videos. Audio recordings. Witness accounts.”

  “And?” she muttered derisively.

  “And all the time, your work has been predicated on the need to get them to appear to you,” he continued, stepping closer to the front of her desk. “Trying to... tease them out.”

  “And?” she said again, somehow managing to sound even more sceptical than before.

  “And what if that is indeed a doomed approach?” he asked. “What if they don't want to be found, at least not in that way?”

  “I know you think you're helping,” she replied, “but you're really not.”

  “So if you can't beat them,” he went on, with a glint in his eye as he recognised that she hadn't yet swatted his idea away, “why not join them?”

  “Even by your standards, this is obtuse,” she murmured. “You've got a good brain, Crowman, but you're still not very good at organising your thoughts. I've tried to help you in that regard, but you need to become better at focusing on the minutiae. The details. All the little things that support the bigger picture.”

  “What if we make a pact?” he asked. “What if we then spend the rest of our time preparing for the day when we can finally put the grandest experiment of all into action?”

  He could see that she was still doubtful, but he also knew that she was still listening to him, and that fact in itself was encouraging.

  “One of us will die before the other,” he went on. “That's just a fact. Barring some kind of unlikely simultaneous disaster, one of us will be at the other's funeral. One of us will be alive and the other will be dead.”

  “Are you trying to be poetic?” she asked with a raised eyebrow. “You know how much I hate poetry. Or are you branching into philosophy? That's hardly any better.”

  “I'm saying that we'll be perfectly placed to conduct the ultimate experiment,” he went on. “We've spent so much time trying to contact ghosts when they don't want to be contacted.” He paused again, and he could see now that she was starting to understand his proposal. “What if we plan ahead?” he asked. “What if we strike a deal?”

  Chapter Five

  Tonight...

  “Come on come on come on,” Kim spluttered, pulling again on the handle at the bottom of the stairwell but finding that the fire exit was just as blocked as the ward's main door. “This can't be happening!”

  Close to tears now, she turned and pulled her mobile phone out again. She'd tried the damn thing a few minutes earlier without any luck, and she knew that the stairwell was an unlikely place to find signal, but she could already feel a sense of genuine panic starting to rise through her chest and she figured that she had to try everything.

  “Just pick up,” she stammered as she thought of her mother several miles away. “Come on, I just need one bar of signal. Just one bar. Or I need the Wi-Fi to restart. Come on, something has to work!”

  She tried for a moment longer, but her hands were trembling and finally she dropped the phone. Muttering a few curses under her breath, she reached down and picked it up, but she was close to the end of her tether and in her heart of hearts she already knew that she wasn't going to get anywhere. At first she'd dismissed Jenny's claim that the entire ward was sealed off from the rest of the world; now she was horrified to find that the warning had been correct.

  “Why is this happening to me?” she whimpered. “I shouldn't even be here alone. There should be someone else. We should be able to fight them off and -”

  Before she could finish, the light at the top of the stairwell briefly blinked off – only for half a second or so, but that was long enough to grab her attention. She looked up, and in that instant she became much more aware of the sound of rain battering a nearby window. The storm seemed to be getting worse outside and she'd begun to not even notice the flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder, but now she worried that the power might go completely.

  Hurrying over to the window, which was tall and thin and shaped for some bizarre reason like an arrow-slit in some medieval castle, she peered out beyond the rain-spattered glass and saw indistinct lights on the other side of the street. Looking down, she saw that some of the lights were moving, and she felt a surge of frustration and helplessness as she understood that safety was so close – and yet so far away. Another flash of lightning briefly lit the scene.

  “Help me!” she shouted, although she knew nobody out there would be able to hear her as thunder rolled across the sky high above. “I'm trapped here, the ward has been taken over by... by maniacs.”

  As those words left her lips, she looked back up the stairs. She'd not seen or heard any sign of the two intruders since she'd rushed away to try to escape, but she knew they were up there somewhere and she felt sure that soon they were going to try to murder her. Swallowing hard, she looked around for anything she might be able to use as a weapon, and finally she spotted a fire extinguisher attached to the wall.

  Hurrying over, she fumbled to get the extinguisher free and then she turned and began to carry it up the steps. Reaching the next corner, she stopped with her back against the wall and stared at the top door.

  “You won't take me alive,” she sobbed. “You think I'm some stupid defenceless little moron, right? Well, you're wrong!” She adjusted her grip on the extinguisher as she tried to come up with a plan. “I'm not defenceless at all!”

  ***

  “You know, that nurse has no sense of humour,” Jenny said, peering out the window and watching the lights of the London street far below. “Like zero. How is that possible? How can someone exist in the world without having a sense of humour?”

  She paused, not really expecting an answer, and then she turned to see that Crowman was still sitting by the bed and holding Edna Vincent's hand. He'd barely said a word since taking up that position, only really answering whenever he was prompted, and she felt a flush of sorrow as she realised that he was clearly struggling to deal with the death of his friend. In that moment she couldn't work out whether it was her job to shake him out of this state – or to just leave him to get on with his grief.

  “You know,” she muttered, glancing at the penguin timer, “that thing is kind of annoying. Isn't there any other way to count the time down?”

  “I imagine,” he said finally, “that all traces of consciousness have now been extinguished inside her brain.”

  “It's been a few minutes,” she pointed out.

  “It's been more than long enough,” he added, getting to his feet and letting go of the dead woman's hand, then wiping one last stray tear from his cheek. “We've left an acceptable margin of error. Now it's time to move to the next sub-stage of the plan.”

  “And are you going to explain exactly what a sub-stage involves,” she replied, “or do I have to keep guessing? I don't mean to pry, Crowman, but you've been even more vague and enigmatic than usual. If you want me to help you out here, you're going to have to fill me in a little more.”

  She waited as he slowly walked around to the foot of the bed, and she watched as he stopped and looked down once more at the dead body of Edna Vincent. She knew that in moments like this it was usually best not to disturb him too much, that his brain was no doubt whirring and that soon he was going to -

  “She's dead,” he said suddenly. “She's now ready to play her part in the experiment.”

  “And her part is...”

  “To get in touch, of course,” he continued, turning to her with a wry smile. “To reach back into this world and make contact.”

  He began to set small cameras on various surfaces, adjusting them each so that they covered the desired range, and then he flicked switches to set them running.

  “Okay, I get it,” she replied. “You want to prove that ghosts exist, that there's some kind of existence after this one, and now you've got... a mole on the other side, so to speak.”

  “That's one way of putting it, yes.”

  “Those things are going to record the evidence when she shows up.”

  “You seem smarter than usual. What did you have for dinner?”

  “And you expect her to come back and tell you all about it,” she suggested as she approached the bed. Looking down, she saw the dead woman's face again. “Other ghosts might be too busy making doors creak, or banging windows, but you're hoping that Edna Vincent can come back and give you a full report.”

  “I'm not hoping,” he replied with a fresh hint of sadness. “Edna and I prepared for this moment. For this night. She had a plan and if she's capable of doing so, she'll be putting that plan into action as we speak.”

  He set another of his devices in place.

  “And what does the plan entail?” she asked, glancing at the light above the bed before looking at him again. “How is she going to send you a signal from the afterlife?”

  “We came up with a whole range of possibilities,” he explained. “We were very aware that she was going to be entering uncharted territory, so we developed our own type of code. My biggest concern is a lack of will. What if, once she's dead, she decides that she doesn't want to spoil the mystery? What if she abandons the plan?”

  He placed his hands very deliberately on the foot of the bed.

  “But I don't think Edna's like that,” he added. “We brainstormed all the possibilities. She prepared herself mentally for this exact moment.”

  He checked his watch.

  “We came to the conclusion that it should take about fifteen minutes.”

  Jenny waited for him to explain further.

  “Fifteen minutes,” she said cautiously, “for... what?”

  “For all brain activity to entirely cease,” he went on. “Even any last flickers. Our theory is that once brain activity is fully over, the human soul – if that's what you want to call it – is free to leave the body. It becomes unstuck.”

  “She steps out of herself?”

  “In a way, although obviously there are a lot of unknown variables.”

  “Okay,” Jenny said, glancing around the room and looking for any hint of a shadow. “So do you think she's here right now? Do you think she's manifesting as a ghost and preparing to get in touch?”

  “When you put it like that,” he replied turning to her again, “it sounds very implausible.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I believe,” he continued, clearly choosing his words with great care, “that her soul – again, I'm using that word cautiously – is now free to decouple from the meat of her body. Only once that is done can she start to become accustomed to her new reality, to her new state of existence. And if there is any chance at all, she will start searching for ways to contact me and prove once and for all that ghosts are real. Think about it, though. The first few minutes as a ghost must be very confusing.”

  “Don't they get a handbook?”

  “Of course they don't get a handbook,” he replied with a scowl. “They have to figure it out themselves.”

  “So that's your big plan? You want to wait until she shows up?”

  “Don't say it like that,” he muttered with a sense of irritation. “No, that's not the big plan, it's just the start of the big plan. The true big plan is to gather enough evidence to make the case irrefutable. To show the whole world what really happens to us once we die.”

  He stepped back from the bed as if he wanted to get a view of the whole room; backing toward the open door, he stopped to take it all in.

  “Can you imagine the implications for humanity?” he asked grandly as the penguin timer continued to tick away. “Can you imagine the profound changes that we might see in the world? Can you even begin to -”

  Suddenly Kim lunged at him from behind, smacking the back of his head with the base of the fire extinguisher and knocking him out cold.

  Chapter Six

  “Are you insane?” Jenny gasped, wrestling the fire extinguisher away from Kim and throwing it to the floor, then spinning her around and slamming her against the wall while taking care to hold her arms tight behind her back. “What the hell did you do that for?”

  “Let go of me!” Kim spluttered, already trying desperately to break free.