Lockwood & Co. Book Three: The Hollow Boy Page 4

  “Anytime you like,” George said. “No hurry.” His position was looking precarious. He still dangled by one hand, and the fingers of that hand were slipping fast.

  Spinning my necklace, I leaped between the coils, feeling them dart aside. I snatched up the rapier as I passed by, skidded under the ladder, and wrenched it bodily forward, dragging its length below George just as his grip gave way.

  He fell—and landed on the middle rungs like a scruffy sack of coal. The ladder bowed; I heard it crack. Well, that was better than him breaking his neck. He’d have made such an annoying ghost.

  A moment later he’d skittered down the ladder like a fireman down a pole. I tossed him his rapier.

  “What’s up there?”

  “Dead person. Angry dead person. That’s all you need to know.” Pausing only to adjust his spectacles, he leaped past to attack the coils.

  Across the room, Lockwood had brought something out of the bag. “Lucy—I’m going to throw it! Climb up and get ready to catch!” He drew back his hand, then darted aside as a swiping tentacle narrowly missed his face. A flick of the rapier; the coil was gone. “Here it is!” he called. “It’s coming now.”

  Lockwood, of course, could throw. I was already moving up the ladder. A small square object came spiraling straight up and over the central beam; down it came, landing right in my hand. Not even a fumble. Close by, George was slashing with his rapier, watching my back, carving coils asunder. I reached the top of the ladder, where it touched the beam.

  And the Source was there.

  After so many years, it lay with surprising neatness on its secret perch. The cobwebs that fused it to the wood had smoothed out the contours of the bones and buried them under a soft gray shroud. You could see the remains of old-style clothes—a tweed suit, two brown shoes tilted at an angle—and the bone ridges around the dust-filled sockets of the eyes. Strands of dark matter—was it hair or matted cobwebs?—ran like water over the lip of the beam. How had it happened? Had he purposefully climbed up there, or been tucked away (more likely) by a murderer’s careful hand? Now was not the time to worry either way. The dead man’s fury pounded in my mind; below me, in the weaving lantern light, Lockwood and George did battle with the coils.

  In those days the Sunrise Corporation provided silver chain nets in plastic boxes, for ease of use. I cracked the lid open, took out the folded net. I let it slip outward until it had fully unfurled between my fingers, thin and loose like an uncooked pastry case, like a shimmering skin of stars.

  Silver snuffs out Sources. I flicked it up and over the beam, over the bones and cobwebs, as calmly and casually as a chambermaid making a bed.

  The net sank down; the fury winked out of my mind. All at once there was a hole there, an echoing silence. The coils froze; a second later they had faded from the attic like mist from a mountaintop: one moment there, the next gone.

  How big the attic seemed without the Changer in it. We stopped dead, right where we were: me sinking down against the ladder, Lockwood and George leaning against the rafters, weary, silent, rapiers gently smoking.

  Smoke twisted from one side of Lockwood’s overcoat. His nose had a residue of silver ash on it. My jacket had burned where the plasm touched it. My hair was a nest of cobwebs. George had contrived to tear the seat of his trousers on a nail or something.

  We were a total mess. We’d been up all night. We smelled of ectoplasm, salt, and fear. We looked at one another, and grinned.

  Then we began laughing.

  Down by the hatch, in its green glass prison, the ghostly face looked on in sour disapproval. “Oh, you’re pleased with that fiasco, are you? Typical! I’m ashamed even to be faintly associated with Lockwood & Co. You three really are hopeless.”

  But that was just it. We weren’t hopeless. We were good. We were the best.

  And we never fully realized it until it was too late.

  BED & BREAKFAST—AND MURDER!

  HORRIFIC SECRETS OF WHITECHAPEL GUESTHOUSE

  BODIES FOUND IN PIT BENEATH GARDEN SHED

  Authorities in East London acted yesterday to seal off Lavender Lodge, a guesthouse in Cannon Lane, Whitechapel, after the discovery of human remains on the property. The owners, Mr. Herbert Evans (72) and his wife, Nora (70), have been arrested and charged with murder and robbery, and with failure to disclose a dangerous haunting. A powerful Visitor, located in the attic of the house, has been destroyed.

  It is believed that over the last ten years many lodgers may have died of ghost-touch while staying at the Lodge. Mr. and Mrs. Evans then disposed of the corpses in a fruit cellar hidden in the back garden. Police have recovered a large number of watches, jewelry, and other personal effects that were taken from the victims.

  The decisive investigation was carried out by the Lockwood & Co. agency, led by Mr. Anthony Lockwood. “Records show that a previous owner of Lavender Lodge vanished in mysterious circumstances more than thirty years ago,” he says. “We think that the mummified body in the attic belonged to him. It was his angry spirit that stalked the house, killing guests as they slept. Mr. and Mrs. Evans took advantage of this for their own personal gain.”

  After subduing the ghost, the agents were forced to break a window and climb down a drainpipe to escape the Lodge, before finally confronting the geriatric duo in their kitchen. “Old Evans proved quite handy with a carving knife,” Mr. Lockwood says, “and his wife came at us with a skewer. So we knocked them on the heads with a broom. It was a ticklish moment, but we’re happy to have survived unscathed.”

  “And that’s it,” Lockwood said disgustedly. He lowered the newspaper and sat back into his armchair. “That’s all the Times gives us for our trouble. There’s more about the scuffle in the kitchen than there is about the Changer. Doesn’t exactly focus on the important stuff, does it?”

  “It’s the ‘unscathed’ bit that I object to,” George said. “That old cow gave me a right old whack. See this horrible red blob?”

  I glanced up at him. “I thought your nose always looked like that.”

  “No, here, on my forehead. This bruise.”

  Lockwood gave an unsympathetic grunt. “Yes, dreadful. What really bothers me is that we only made page seven. No one’s going to notice that. The massive Chelsea outbreak is dominating the news again. All our stuff’s getting lost.”

  It was late morning, two days after the Lavender Lodge affair, and we were stretched out in the library of our house in Portland Row, trying to relax. Outside the window a gale was blowing. Portland Row seemed formed of liquid. Trees flexed; rain pattered on the panes. Inside, it was warm; we had the heating on full-blast.

  George was slumped on the sofa beside a giant pile of crumpled ironing, sweat pants akimbo, reading a comic. “It is a shame they don’t talk more about the actual case,” he said. “The way the Changer created its own little cluster of other ghosts was fascinating. It’s how the Problem spreads, some say—strong Visitors causing violent deaths, which lead to secondary hauntings. I would have loved to study it in more detail.”

  That was how George always was, once the panic of a case died down. He was curious about it: he wanted to understand why and how it happened. Me, it was the emotional impact of each adventure that I couldn’t quite shake off.

  “I just felt sorry for all those poor ghost-touched men,” I said. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor below the sofa. Officially, I was sorting the mail; unofficially, I’d been having a gentle doze, having been up till three on a Lurker case the night before. “I could feel their sadness,” I went on. “And even that Changer…yes, it was terrifying, but it was unhappy, too. I could feel its pain. And if I’d had more time to try to connect with it properly—”

  “It would have killed you stone dead.” From the depths of his chair Lockwood gave me a look. “Your Talent’s amazing, Luce, but the only ghost you should communicate with is the skull, because it’s locked up in its jar….And to be honest, I’m not even sure that’s safe.”

 
; “Oh, the skull’s okay,” I said. “It helped me with my Lurker case last night. Gave me a fix on the Source, so I could dig it up. We were quite close to Chelsea, where we were. What about you two? Either of you hear the sirens?”

  Lockwood nodded. “Another three people killed. DEPRAC is completely clueless, as usual. They were evacuating a couple of streets, I think.”

  “Way more than that,” George said. “The outbreak stretches a good square mile along the King’s Road. More ghosts every night, in greater concentration than ever before, and no one knows why.” He adjusted his glasses. “It’s weird. Until recently, Chelsea was pretty quiet, everything peaceful—then, all at once, things go into haunting overdrive. It’s like an infection spreading. But here’s what I want to know—how do you actually fire ghosts up? How do you infect the dead?”

  There was no answer to this, and I didn’t try to provide one. Lockwood just groaned; he’d been chasing a Specter through Hackney marshes until the early hours and was in no mood for George’s ponderings. “All I care about,” he said, “is how Chelsea’s hogging our publicity. You do know that Kipps’s team is working on it? He’s on page one today, giving some stupid quote or other. Page one! That’s where we should be! We need to take part in something big like that. I should speak to Barnes, maybe, see if he wants us to help out. Trouble is, we’re already so overworked….”

  Yes, we were….It was November, as I’ve mentioned, at the beginning of what would become known as the “Black Winter,” the deadliest period yet in the history of the Problem. The epidemic of hauntings that had beset the nation for more than fifty years had reached new levels of intensity, and the terrifying outbreak in the district of Chelsea was just the tip of the iceberg. All psychic investigation agencies were stretched to the breaking point. Lockwood & Co. was no exception. “Overworked” didn’t really cover it.

  We lived, the three of us, in a four-story property in Portland Row, London, which was the headquarters of our agency. Lockwood himself owned the house. It had once belonged to his parents, and their collection of oriental wards and ghost-chasers still lined the walls of many rooms. Lockwood had converted the basement into an office, with desks, iron stores, and a rapier practice room. At the rear, a reinforced glass door led out into the garden, complete with a little lawn and apple trees, where we’d sometimes lounge in summer. On the upper floors were bedrooms; the ground floor contained the kitchen, the library, and the living room, where Lockwood interviewed our clients. It was here that we spent most time.

  For several months, though, time had been in extremely short supply. This was partly due to our own success. In July our investigation at Kensal Green Cemetery had ended with the so-called “Battle in the Graveyard,” featuring a fight between agents and a group of violent black-marketeers. Along with our encounter with the horrific Rat-Ghost of Hampstead, it had aroused a lot of interest in the press, and this interest continued during the trial of the chief marketeer, a man named Julius Winkman. Lockwood, George, and I had all testified against him; by the time Winkman was sent down for a stiff stretch in Wandsworth Prison, it was the middle of September, and our period of free publicity had lasted nearly two months. During this time, our phone had seldom stopped ringing.

  It was true that most wealthy clients preferred to stick with the large agencies, which had swankier equipment and bigger reputations. Most of our business came from poorer districts like Whitechapel, where clients didn’t pay so well. But jobs were jobs, and Lockwood didn’t like to turn any of them down. This meant that free evenings were few and far between.

  “Anything going on tonight, George?” Lockwood said suddenly. He’d thrown a weary arm over his face, and I’d assumed he was asleep. “Please say no.”

  George said nothing, just raised three fingers.

  “Three?” Lockwood uttered a long and hollow groan. “What are they?”

  “Woman in a veil on Nelson Street, Whitechapel; a haunted apartment in a housing project, and a Shade spotted behind some public restrooms. The usual glamorous stuff.”

  “We’ll have to split up again,” Lockwood said. “Dibs on the veiled woman.”

  George grunted. “Dibs on the Shade.”

  “What?” My head jerked up. The dibs rule was second only to the biscuit rule in terms of importance. It always held firm. “So I get the housing project? Brilliant. I bet the elevators will be out, and everything.”

  “You’re fit enough to manage a few stairs, Luce,” Lockwood murmured.

  “What if it’s twenty-one floors? What if there’s a Raw-bones at the top, and I’m too out of breath to deal with it? Wait, what if the elevator is working, but the ghost’s hidden inside? You remember what happened to that girl from the Sebright Agency when she got stuck in that haunted elevator at Canary Wharf? They only found her shoes!”

  “Stop burbling,” Lockwood said. “You’re tired. We all are. You know it’ll be fine.”

  We all subsided again. I leaned my head back against the sofa cushions. Rivulets of water laced the library window like veins of blood.

  Okay, not really like veins of blood. I was tired…like Lockwood said.

  Lockwood…Through half-closed eyes, I watched him now, trapping him tight between my lashes. I looked at his long legs, loosely crossed over the side of the chair; at the bare feet, at the slim contours of his body half-concealed beneath the rumpled shirt. His face was mostly covered by his arm, but you could see the line of his jaw and the expressive lips, relaxed and slightly parted. His dark hair spilled softly over the white sleeve.

  How did he manage to look like that after five hours’ sleep, lying curled and crumpled in the chair? Being half-dressed never did me any favors; with George, it practically came with a health warning. Yet Lockwood managed to carry it off perfectly. It was pleasantly warm in the room. My eyelashes squeezed a little tighter. I put my hand to my silver necklace, turning it slowly between my fingers….

  “We need a new agent,” Lockwood said.

  I opened my eyes wide. Behind me, I heard George put his comic down. “What?”

  “We need another operative. Another working agent to back us up. Don’t we? We shouldn’t have to keep separating all the time.”

  “We worked together at Lavender Lodge,” I said.

  “That was a one-off.” Lockwood moved his arm, and pushed the hair out of his face. “Hardly ever happens now. Anyway, look around. We’re not really coping, are we?”

  George yawned. “What makes you say that?” He gave an almighty stretch and knocked over the pile of ironing, which collapsed on my head. Like a giant amoeba undulating purposefully across a petri dish, a pair of George’s briefs flopped slowly past my nose.

  “Case in point,” Lockwood said as I shook myself free. “One of you should have sorted all that. But you haven’t had time.”

  “Or you could always iron them, of course,” George said.

  “Me? I’m even busier than you.”

  This was the way it always went now. We were working so hard at night, we had no energy for doing stuff during the day. So we no longer got around to inessential things, such as keeping the place tidy or sorting the laundry. All of 35 Portland Row was suffering. The kitchen looked like a salt-bomb had gone off in it. Even the skull in the jar, no stranger to vile surroundings, had made indignant comments about the environment we lived in.

  “If we had another agent,” Lockwood said, “we could properly take turns. One of us could rest at home each night and do odd jobs during the day. I’ve been considering this for a while. It’s the only answer, I think.”

  George and I were silent. The idea of a new colleague didn’t much appeal to me. In fact, it gave me a twisty sort of feeling in my belly. Overstretched as we definitely were, I liked the way we operated. As we had at Lavender Lodge, we backed each other up when necessary, and we got things done.

  “Are you sure?” I said at last. “Where would they sleep?”

  “Not on the floor,” George said. “They�
��d probably get some disease.”

  “Well, they’re not sharing the attic with me.”

  “They wouldn’t have to sleep here, you idiots,” Lockwood growled. “Since when has living under the same roof been a requirement for the job? They could turn up for work in the morning, like ninety-nine percent of other people do.”

  “Maybe it’s not a full agent that we need,” I suggested. “Maybe we just need an assistant. Someone to tidy up after us. In all the important stuff, surely, we’re doing fine.”

  “I agree with Lucy.” George returned to his comic. “We’ve got a good setup here. We shouldn’t mess it up.”

  “Well, I’ll think about it,” Lockwood said.

  The truth was, of course, that Lockwood was far too busy to think about it at all, and so nothing was ever likely to happen. Which suited me just fine. I’d been at the company eighteen months so far. Yes, we were overworked; yes, we lived in partial squalor. Yes, we risked our lives almost every night. Yet I was very happy.

  Why? Three reasons: my colleagues, my new self-knowledge, and because of an opened door.

  Of all the agencies in London, Lockwood & Co. was unique. Not just because it was the smallest (total number of agents: three), but because it was owned and run by someone who was himself young. Other agencies employed hundreds of child operatives—they had to, of course, because only children could detect ghosts—but these companies were firmly controlled by adults who never got closer to a haunted house than shouting distance across the street. Lockwood, however, was a leader who fought ghosts himself—his skills with the rapier were second to none—and I knew I was lucky to work at his side. Lucky in a lot of ways. Not only was he independent, but he was an inspiring companion, managing to be both coolly unflappable and recklessly audacious at the same time. And his air of mystery only added to his allure.

  Lockwood seldom spoke of his emotions, desires, or the influences that drove him, and in the first year of living at Portland Row, I had learned almost nothing about his past. His absent parents were an enigma, even though their possessions hung on every wall. How he’d come to own the house, with enough money to start his own agency, I likewise didn’t have a clue. To begin with, this didn’t much matter. Secrets followed Lockwood about like the flapping of his coat, and it was nice to be close enough to feel them brush against me, too.