The Empty Grave Read online

  “I sometimes ask myself what it’s all about, Luce,” Lockwood said. “Why we do what we do. When we have nights like last night, for instance—why we put ourselves through all that. Or when twerps like Tufnell come bleating and blustering at our door, and we have to sit there humoring him. When I get that kind of thought, I sometimes pop in here.”

  I looked at him. He stood beside me in the dusk, his face almost hidden behind the raised collar of his coat. I’d often wondered where they were, his family. But I’d never dared ask. And now he was sharing this most private of places with me. Amid my sorrow for him, I felt a kind of joy.

  “This is what the Problem means,” he went on. “This is the effect it has. Lives lost, loved ones taken before their time. And then we hide our dead behind iron walls and leave them to the thorns and ivy. We lose them twice over, Lucy. Death’s not the worst of it. We turn our faces away.”

  On the far edge of the tiny clearing, an older headstone had toppled almost to the ground. Lockwood went over to it; he sat cross-legged on the stone, with brambles spun close around him. His dark clothes merged with the shadows; his smile floated palely in the half-light. “I usually perch on this,” he said. “Belongs to someone named Derek Tompkins-Bond. He doesn’t seem to mind me being here. At least, he’s never showed up to tell me so.” He patted the stone beside him. “Come and join me if you want. But watch out for that rail.”

  Sure enough, I’d almost tripped on a black metal rod, no higher than my ankle, that ran through the grass at my feet. I knew what it was: an edge used to mark the boundary of a plot. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now I saw that the Lockwood headstones were set in their own railed-off family plot. And I noticed too that while Jessica’s stone was set in the center of this space, and the parents’ stone was to the left, there was an empty area on the right-hand side.

  I looked at this bare patch of grass. And when I did so, everything faded out—the beating of my heart, the whispering of the wind as it worked its way through the holes and hollows of the ivy, the sound of distant Night Cabs on the Marylebone Road.

  I gazed at it. At the unobtrusive patch of ground. At the empty, waiting grave.

  It took me a moment to realize that Lockwood was still talking. “By the time my sister died they’d shut the cemetery for safety reasons,” he said. “There was some controversy about putting her here. But when there are family plots, where it’s the clear intention that people should be buried together, it’s considered proper to honor the wishes of the dead.”

  We both knew why. Keep the dead happy. Don’t give them a reason to come back.

  I stepped over the rail, crossed the grass, and sat on the stone beside him.

  “It’s nice, don’t you think,” Lockwood said, “burying the family together? Anyway,” he added, after a pause, “I don’t want to be left out. I come here sometimes too.”

  I nodded. I was looking at the stamped, sliced foliage, chopped and broken and savagely hacked back. I found my voice at last. “Thanks for bringing me,” I said.

  “That’s all right.”

  We sat in silence for a time, pressed close together on the stone. At last I was emboldened. “You never told me how it happened.”

  “My parents?” Lockwood paused for so long I thought he was going to refuse to talk about it, like always. But when he spoke, his voice was soft; it carried no barbs or warning signs. “Funnily enough,” he said, “it wasn’t far from here.”

  “What? In Marylebone?”

  “On the Euston Road. You know where that underpass is? There.”

  I stared at him. “You never told me.” The underpass was a short, ugly concrete tunnel where the Euston Road ducked underground to avoid intersecting with another important street. Night Cabs drove us through it all the time, Lockwood and me. He’d never given me the slightest inkling. “So it was a car accident?” I said.

  He drew one knee up, clasped it with his hands. “Quite a spectacular one. It was when I was very young. My mother and father were setting off to Manchester to give an important lecture. It was meant to be a summary of all their research trips, all their findings. But they never even reached the train station. In the underpass their cab was struck by a truck, which ignited, along with all the spilled fuel. It took almost an hour for the fire to be put out. It was so hot they had to repave a portion of the road.”

  “My God, Lockwood…” I reached out in the dark and touched his hand.

  “It’s all right. It was a long time ago. I barely remember them.” He gave me a sidelong smile. “It’s odd, but what saddens me most sometimes is that their lecture was lost, too. I would have liked to have read it….Anyway, I remember looking down from your attic window that night, seeing armored vehicles blocking Portland Row, with all their lights flashing and agents standing around while the police spoke to Jessica and our nanny downstairs. They were Fittes agents, incidentally. I remember being fascinated by the color of their dark gray jackets.”

  A long pause. Dusk deepened around us. Leaves merged; our hands stayed together. I didn’t say anything.

  “So they told Jessica then,” Lockwood went on. “But no one told me till the following morning—which was completely pointless, as I’d listened to it all from the top of the stairs. Pointless twice over, because I’d known about it hours before anyone, when I saw my parents’ Shades watching me in the garden.”

  I wasn’t surprised. He’d told me that once before. They were his first ghosts. “You knew they were dead?”

  “Not exactly. Maybe deep down. Turns out I saw them at the exact time of the accident….Anyway, that’s how that happened. My sister’s story, you already know. And now there’s just me.” A sudden burst of energy seemed to pass through him, like a shudder or an electric charge. He sprang up, off the stone and away from me. “Well, there’s no use talking about it,” he said. “We should be getting back.”

  I drew in a long breath. In the same way that the graveyard was choked with the winding weeds and brambles, my head felt full now, choked with Lockwood’s memories. It was no different than the sensations I got when I picked up psychic feedback through the power of Touch. They didn’t feel like secondhand emotions. It was like I’d been there, like I’d experienced them myself. I got up slowly. “I’m so sorry, Lockwood,” I said. “What an awful thing.”

  “It can’t be helped.” He frowned into the dark. His mood had altered, become suddenly brittle. He was impatient to be gone.

  “I’m glad you brought me. I’m glad you told me everything, too.”

  He shrugged. “It’s nice to share it with you, Luce. Though all it really does is show how arbitrary everything is. A ghost kills my sister. My parents die in an accident. Why did they die and not me? Believe me, I’ve looked for an answer, and there isn’t one. There’s no meaning to any of it.” His face was shadowed; he turned away from me. “Well, none of us are here for very long. While we’re alive, all we can do is keep on fighting. Try to make our contribution count. Speaking of which, we’ve a haunted theater to deal with tomorrow, and it’s getting late. If you’re ready, we should go.”

  “‘While we’re alive’?” I repeated.

  But he was already setting off along the little track. His sword glimmered in the half-light, but his form was rapidly lost in the surrounding press of green. His voice called back with its old easy ring. “Are you coming, Luce?”

  “Yes, of course I am!” But I was looking at the waiting grave.

  “So, how’s it going with Lockwood? Pretty well?”

  I was the first one down to the kitchen next morning. The ghost-jar had been on the table all the previous day, its lever shut, its plaintive pulsations ignored. I’d been too busy to humor it. Even so, I did feel slightly bad that I’d neglected it all that time. I flicked the lever in the top of the jar, took a mug from the cupboard, and put the kettle on. Slice it however you like, if you’re going to have a haunted skull talking to you before breakfast, you need a cup of tea.

 
; “Yeah,” I said. “No different from normal.”

  I’d been thinking about Lockwood, about how he’d confided in me (which was good), and (less good) how the loss of his family drove him on. How he threw himself into the fight against the Problem with an almost hopeless fervor. I was wondering where this was likely to end. I hadn’t slept so well.

  “It’s just I sense developments. I saw the pair of you slinking off alone last night.”

  “Spying on us again? You should get a different hobby.” I tried to look stern, uninterested, and scathing all at once. “Anyway, what do I care? We were on a case.”

  The face nodded. “Oh, you were on a case?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay. I buy that.” The skull looked placidly at me. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  I hesitated, then cleared my throat. “Um, okay…Well—”

  “If you’re looking for a clean teaspoon, there’s one by the sink.”

  “Thanks.”

  I opened the fridge to get some milk. As I closed the door, the face in the jar gave a sudden theatrical start that almost made me drop the bottle. The rubbery eyes looked wildly in all directions; the nostrils flared, the mouth contorted in alarm. “Ooh, I smell something burning….Wait, wait, it’s your pants! Your pants are on fire, you massive liar! You so weren’t on a case!”

  “We were too! We went to a graveyard, and—”

  “A graveyard?” The ghost chuckled low and long. “Say no more! In my experience, graveyards can be used for lots of activities, not just ghost-hunting.” It gave me a slow, atrocious wink.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But I could feel my cheeks flushing.

  The evil face grinned knowingly. “There, I knew I was right. And don’t try to tell me you were scrapping with ghosts. You didn’t take any equipment.”

  “We had our rapiers!”

  “I can tell when there’s ectoplasm on a blade and when there isn’t. No, you and Lockwood went for a cozy chat, didn’t you? And came back with brambles in your hair.”

  I spoke as lightly as I could. “Well, it was very overgrown.”

  “I bet it was.”

  My snort of disdain was fierce enough to keep the skull quiet while I finished making my mug of tea. I threw the spoon in the sink and sat in the half-dark on the far side of the table, keeping clear of the jar’s halo of green other-light. I glared intently at it, pondering my next move. How much to give, how much to seek. It was always a subtle and infuriating business, bargaining with a skull.

  This main Talent of mine—psychic Listening—had long been considered the most imperfect of an agent’s arts. Usually it was just about ominous sound effects: picking up the thud and drag of a body being hauled along a landing, for example, or hearing the scratches of broken fingernails along a cellar wall. Sometimes you got actual words spoken by a spirit, too, but these were always repetitive fragments, echoes of memory without true intelligence behind them. Or almost always. In her Memoirs, Marissa Fittes, the most famous Listener of all, had stated that other, more communicative Visitors did exist. She classified them as Type Three spirits, capable of full conversations. But they were very rare. So rare, in fact, that since her death (real or faked), no one else had come across any.

  No one except me. I had the skull in the jar.

  Though his mortal career was steeped in mystery, and though it refused to even divulge its name to me, one or two facts were known about this ghost. In the late nineteenth century, as a youth, he’d helped the occult doctor Edmund Bickerstaff create a bone glass, the first window onto the Other Side. Bickerstaff himself had been killed soon after the creation of the artifact, but the youth had escaped. His later activities were unknown. However, he had clearly come to a bad end, since his next recorded appearance, half a century later, was as a skull dredged up in the Lambeth sewers. The Fittes Agency, recognizing its potency as a Source, had trapped it in the jar, and the ghost had languished there ever since. Marissa Fittes had spoken with it, albeit briefly. After that no one had done so—until I came along.

  I stared at the jar across the kitchen table. The spectral face stared back at me.

  “We were going to talk about Marissa,” I began.

  “We were going to talk about my freedom.”

  I watched the steam rise from my mug, twisting, coiling like liberated ectoplasm. “Oh, you don’t want that,” I said. “What does freedom even mean? You’d still be tied to your moldy old skull, wouldn’t you, even if you did escape the jar? Say I let you out. What would you do?”

  “I’d flit about. Stretch my plasm. Might strangle Cubbins. Carry out a spot of casual ghost-touch, now and again. Just simple hobbies. It would be a darn sight more enjoyable than sitting here.”

  I grinned at it. “You make your case so well,” I said. “See how I’m itching to break the jar. Even if I could trust you, which I clearly can’t, you wouldn’t want it anyway. Who would you talk to if you didn’t have me?”

  “I’d talk to you. I’d stick around, help you out from time to time.”

  “Oh, sure you would. While strangling my friends.”

  “I’d strangle your enemies, too. I’m not fussy. How’s that for a tip-top deal?”

  “Absolute rubbish,” I said. “Tell you what: You want a deal? I’ll make you an official one. You give me more information on Marissa Fittes, information that helps us get to the bottom of this whole mystery—and perhaps sheds light on the causes of the Problem—and I’ll figure out some way to set you free. It’ll be a way that doesn’t involve George’s untimely death, or anyone else’s, but I’ll see what I can do.” I took a sip of tea.

  The face looked unconvinced. “No deaths? Doesn’t sound like much fun. Anyway, we’ve gone over this ground before. What more can I possibly tell you?”

  “Ah!” Frustration bubbled up within me. I banged the mug down on the table, sloshing brown splashes onto the Thinking Cloth. “That’s the whole point! You never tell me anything! Not really. About Marissa, about you and who you really are, about the nature of the Other Side…It’s all insults, and no facts—that’s the way it is with you!”

  “When you’re a ghost,” the skull said blandly, “you find that facts are overrated. You sort of leave them behind with your mortal body. It’s nothing but emotions and desires with us spirits, as I’m sure you’ve seen. ‘I’ve lost my gold!’ ‘I want revenge!’ ‘Bring me Marissa Fittes!’ All that old hokum. Know what my desire is?” It flashed a sudden grin at me.

  “Something foul, no doubt.”

  “To live, Lucy. To live. That’s why I talk to you. That’s why I turned my back on what waits for us on the Other Side.”

  “So what does wait for us there?” I spoke lightly, but my hand gripped my mug a little harder. This was more like it; this was the kind of detail I was after.

  As always, I was disappointed. “How should I know?”

  “Well, you’re dead. I should think that helps.”

  “Ooh, we are snarky today. You’ve been to the Other Side, too. What did you see?”

  I’d seen an awful lot of darkness, and an awful lot of cold. A place that was a terrible and freezing echo of the living world. I’d thought about it often, lying in bed, dreaming the dreams that made me cry out and then lie awake till dawn.

  “Hear any celestial trumpets, did you, while you were there?” the skull prompted.

  I’d heard nothing. It had been a ferociously silent place.

  “I was too busy trying to survive to take a proper survey,” I said primly.

  “Yeah, well, me too,” the ghost said. “That’s my story too for the last one hundred and ten years. And if it wasn’t for my cuddly Source here”—with this it sort of surged back lovingly around the brown skull at the center of the jar, so that for a moment you could glimpse the face as it would have been in life, less rubbery, wrapped neatly around the bones—“I’d have been a wanderer in the dark world like all the those other dumb idiots.
Agh! No thanks! That’s not for me. I keep myself turned toward the light, and it isn’t easy, I can tell you, particularly when the living insist on asking stupid questions.”

  “When you were at Fittes House long ago, what questions did Marissa ask you?” I said. My hopes weren’t high, but it seemed like a decent moment to move in.

  Dim lights flared in the ghost’s eyes. “It was so many years back….Similar ones to yours, I think. About the Other Side, about the nature of spirits—what we do and why…Also, she was very interested in ectoplasm.”

  “Ectoplasm? Why?”

  “It’s fascinating stuff.” The face distorted, reversing into itself so that the nose and brow ridges were pointing backward into the jar. “It listens, it communicates, you can mold it into funny and obscene shapes. How’d you think I spent the last fifty years? Want me to show you some of my favorites? I call this one the ‘Happy Farmhand.’”

  “No, thank you. And I certainly don’t see why Marissa would be interested in that.”

  “She wasn’t, to be fair. Cheeky origami wasn’t her thing. But you have to understand: plasm represents the part of you that survives—that passes from one side to the other. You can call it your essence, your life force, whatever you want. It doesn’t decay. It doesn’t die. It doesn’t really change. That’s how I know Penelope Fittes is actually Marissa.” The face pressed close to the glass. “Because their essence is exactly the same.”

  “Even though they look so different?” It was one of the things that had puzzled us about the skull’s claims. Penelope Fittes was glossy and glamorous, a raven-haired woman in her thirties; Marissa, in later years at least, had been a gaunt and shriveled creature, prey to the frailties of age.

  “Looks?” the skull said. “Who cares about that? It’s superficial. Outward appearance doesn’t interest me at all. Why do you think I hang around with you?” It chuckled. “Insult aside, that’s just one way in which I’m superior to every one of you, except for Cubbins.”

  I blinked. “What? Why? What’s George got to do with anything?”