The Empty Grave

by Jonathan Stroud

  Now we had a square hole in the center of the floor.

  When Holly shone her flashlight into it, we could see a flight of stone steps leading steeply into blackness. Beyond the steps the light was swallowed utterly.

  A damp, dark, earthy smell rose invisibly around us.

  “Deep hole,” Kipps whispered.

  “Anyone see anything?”

  “No.”

  There was a brief silence. Now that we had gained access to the crypt, the enormity of what we were about to do fell over us. It was like the darkness hanging above our heads had suddenly, silently, shifted lower. Marissa’s face watched us from the wall.

  We all stood there quietly, using our psychic senses. None of us got anything. Our belt thermometers showed a steady fifty-four degrees, and we detected no supernatural chill, no miasma, malaise, or creeping fear. There was no immediate likelihood of an apparition.

  “Good,” Lockwood said. “Collect your things. We’ll proceed as planned. I’ll go first. Then George, followed by Holly and Luce, with Quill at the back. We’ll turn our flashlights off, but carry candles. I’ll have my rapier; the rest of you keep your weapons ready too. Not that we’ll need them.” He gave us his best grin. “We don’t believe she’s there.”

  But a nameless dread had stolen up on us. In part it was the power of the iron face, and of the name inscribed in stone. And it was also the feel of the dank air rising from the hole. It coiled around us, entwining us with unease. We gathered our things slowly. George passed among us, flicking his lighter, igniting our candles. We lined up, hefting rapiers, clearing throats, readying our belts.

  Kipps vocalized his thoughts: “Are we sure we want to do this?”

  “We’ve gotten this far,” Lockwood said. “Of course we do.”

  I nodded. “We can’t wimp out now,” I said.

  Kipps looked at me. “You’re right, Lucy. Maybe I’m being overly cautious. I mean, it’s not as if our tip came from an evil talking skull that probably wishes us all dead, is it?”

  Everyone glanced over at the open backpack I was carrying. I’d just put the jar inside. The ghost’s face had disappeared now; only the skull was showing. Even I had to admit that its death-black sockets and leering toothy grin weren’t entirely reassuring.

  “I know you have a lot of faith in this skull,” Kipps went on. “I know it’s your best friend and all, but what if it’s wrong? What if it’s simply mistaken?” He glanced up at the wall. His voice dropped to a whisper. “She might be waiting for us, down there.”

  Another moment and the mood would have shifted irrevocably. Lockwood stepped between us. He spoke with crisp decision. “No one needs to worry. George, remind them.”

  “Sure.” George adjusted his spectacles. “Remember, all the stories say that Marissa Fittes gave orders for her body to be placed in a special coffin. We’re talking iron inlays and silver casing. So, if the skull’s wrong, and her body is there, her spirit won’t be able to bother us,” he said. “It’ll be safely constrained.”

  “And when we open the coffin?” Kipps asked.

  “Oh, that’ll only be for a second, and we’ll have our defenses in place by then.”

  “The point is,” Lockwood said, “no ghost is going to attack us on the way down. Right, George?”

  “Right.”

  “Good. Very well, then.” Lockwood turned to the stair.

  “Obviously there might be a few traps,” George said.

  Lockwood paused with his foot hovering above the top step. “Traps?”

  “Not saying there are. Just that there might be some.” George pushed his glasses up his nose and gave an encouraging flourish with one hand. “Anyway, Lockwood—the stairs await! Off you go.”

  Lockwood did a sort of reverse swivel. Now he was facing George. “Hold it,” he said. “What traps are these?”

  “Yes. I’m quite interested in this, too,” Holly said.

  We all were. We gathered around George, who did something with his shoulders that was probably meant to be a casual shrug. “Oh, it’s just silly rumors,” he said. “Frankly, I’m surprised you’re interested. Some say Marissa didn’t want grave robbers interfering with her tomb, so she took precautions.” He paused. “Some say these precautions might be…supernatural ones.”

  “Now you tell us,” Holly said.

  “When was this little fact going to be mentioned?” I demanded. “When a Specter put its fingers around my neck?”

  George made an impatient gesture. “It’s probably nonsense. Besides, it would have been a distraction earlier. It’s my job to distinguish between solid fact and rumor.”

  “No, that’s my job,” Lockwood said. “Your job is to tell me everything so I can make the judgment.”

  There was a heavy pause. “Do you always argue like this?” Kipps asked.

  Lockwood gave a bland smile. “Usually. I sometimes think incessant bickering is the oil that lubricates our efficient machine.”

  George looked up. “You reckon?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, are you going to bait me on that as well?”

  “I thought you liked some bickering! You just said—”

  “I don’t like anything that much! Now, can everyone please shut up?” Lockwood gazed around at us. His dark eyes locked on ours, holding our attention, steadying our collective purpose. “Traps or no traps,” he said, “we can handle this. We have two hours to check the tomb, close it up, and be ready to go when the sentries change again. Do we want to learn the truth about Penelope Fittes and Marissa? Of course we do! We’ve worked wonders to get here, and we won’t panic now. If we’re right, there won’t be anything to worry about. If we’re wrong, we deal with it, as we always do.” He smiled. “But we won’t be wrong. We’re on the verge of something big here. It’s going to be good!”

  Kipps adjusted his goggles dolefully. “Since when has anything good happened in a crypt? It’s going to be bad by definition.”

  But Lockwood was already heading down the stairs. Beyond him, light flickered on the iron face. Its thin lips seemed to smile as we descended into the dark.

  Okay, let’s just pause for a moment, while we’re still at the top of the stairs. Nothing nasty has jumped out at us. No traps have been sprung. We’re all alive and well. That makes it a good time to consider just how the five of us (five and a bit, if you include the skull) came to be there at all, descending illegally into the most famous tomb in London.

  I don’t mean the mechanics of how we got inside the mausoleum, though that’s a story in itself: the long nights George spent watching the movements of the guards; the weeks Kipps spent shadowing the sergeant with the key; the stealing of the key (this a masterpiece of timing, with Holly distracting the sergeant while Lockwood plucked it from his jacket, took a wax impression, and returned it, all in thirty seconds flat); finally the forging of a replica, thanks to an underworld contact of our disreputable friend Flo Bones. I don’t even mean how we snuck in during the changing of the guards.

  I mean why we took the risk at all.

  For the answer to that we have to go back five months, to a walk that Lockwood and I took through a dark and frozen landscape. This little stroll completely shook up how we operated, and changed the way we saw ourselves.

  Why? Because, entirely unexpectedly, we had stepped out of our world and into another place. Where was this place? That’s hard to say. Some call it the Other Side; I guess it has other names, too, which people in the old religions and the ghost-cults use. But from what I saw, it wasn’t a heaven or a hell; just a world very similar to our own, only freezing cold and silent and stretched out under a black sky. The dead walked there, and it was their home—while Lockwood and I were the interlopers. Ours was the unnatural presence in their endless night.

  We had ventured there by accident, and only just managed to escape, but we discovered there were other living souls who had deliberately chosen to explore that forbidden path. One was no less a person than Mr. Steve Rotw
ell, grandson of Tom Rotwell, and head of the giant Rotwell Agency. He had been carrying out experiments, sending employees (protected by iron armor) through a gate or portal to the Other Side. His exact purpose we could not tell. When he attempted to silence us, our confrontation ended with Rotwell’s death and the destruction of his secret research facility. The repercussions of this were far-reaching. For a start, the Rotwell Agency was taken over by its archrival, the Fittes Agency, headed by the formidable Ms. Penelope Fittes, who swiftly set about establishing herself as the most powerful woman in Britain.

  But there were darker consequences, too. Our experiences had indicated that there was a strong connection between the activity of spirits—in particular their keenness to return to our world—and the presence of living persons on the Other Side. It seemed that when the land of the dead was invaded, the dead became active, and much more likely to invade the land of the living. This discovery was of vast importance. For more than fifty years, the Problem—the epidemic of ghosts infesting Britain—had spread and worsened, confounding all attempts to understand or halt it. We held in our hands a clue to the possible cause, and we itched to spread this news.

  Only we couldn’t. Because we’d been forbidden to do so.

  This edict had come from none other than Penelope Fittes herself. She didn’t know about the strange journey Lockwood and I had made (we had told nobody but our friends), but she knew something of what we’d discovered at the Rotwell Institute, and she wanted no word of it getting out to the ordinary population. It wasn’t a friendly piece of advice either, more a coolly delivered threat. We were under no illusions about what would happen to us if we chose to give up our silence and go our own way.

  This, by itself, was outrageous enough: the woman at the heart of the fight against the Problem was telling us not to explore its possible cause. Exactly what her motive might be was unknown, but it was hard to imagine an innocent explanation. Yet there was something else, something more disturbing still; and for that insight we had the ghost in the jar to thank. Long ago, it had spoken with the great Marissa Fittes; now it had seen Penelope, and it had big news for us. According to the skull, Penelope was Marissa—they were precisely the same person.

  However much we might distrust Penelope Fittes herself, it was clearly not easy to establish the truth of this extraordinary claim. But we could check one thing.

  We could see whether Marissa was in her grave.

  The stairs were steep and narrow. We descended slowly, step by careful step. Lockwood was at the front, then George, with Holly and me following. Kipps brought up the rear. Each of us held a candle raised at eye level, and so our circles of light fused together, making a little radiant worm or caterpillar, inching its way into the earth.

  Behind us, the dim gray cone of lantern light seeping through the trapdoor faded from view. To our right was a wall of neat stone blocks, shiny and gleaming with moisture. To the left was an open, unknown space, which our candlelight could not penetrate. Lockwood risked a brief flick of his flashlight, revealing a shocking well of black that made us all flinch toward the right-hand wall. Then, disconcertingly, this wall vanished too, and we were descending, with an abyss of darkness on either side.

  Your head did weird things in such a place. Your legs shook; you no longer had full control over your muscles. You kept feeling you were about to lurch aside and plunge into oblivion. The problem was compounded by the need for high psychic alert, the fear of something rising toward you out of the dark. Every couple of steps we had to stop and use our Talents, and this straining against the silence made your head spin even more.

  It didn’t help that the skull in my backpack insisted on doing a running commentary, constantly adding little reminders of the peril we were in.

  “Ooh, this is a nasty bit,” it said. “Careful you don’t suddenly step sideways and plunge horribly to your death.” And: “What’s it like, falling in pitch-darkness, I wonder?” Or simply: “Crikey, don’t trip now!” And so on, until I threatened to toss it over the edge.

  The wall returned, and at that point the steps veered abruptly to the left, going down no less steeply. The green glow at my shoulder flared with sullen light. “I’m bored,” the ghost said. “It’s Lockwood’s fault. He’s such a dawdler.”

  “He’s being sensible. He’s checking for traps.”

  “He’s like an old granny crossing the road. I’ve seen algae move faster.”

  It was true that Lockwood was taking it steadily. Down beyond the heads of the others I could see him, on the fringe of the candlelight, stooping, peering, patiently checking each slab before treading on it, inspecting the wet stones of the wall. That was where he always was—at the forefront of the group, standing between us and the darkness. How poised and graceful he was. His presence gave me courage, even in a place like this. I smiled at him. He couldn’t see me, of course. It didn’t matter.

  “You all right, Lucy?” That was Kipps at my shoulder. “Got gas or something?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Just saw you grimacing there. Tell you what, my goggles are fogging up. Wish we’d get to the bottom of this wretched vault. Lockwood’s taking his time.”

  “He’s doing what he has to,” I said. We both fell silent. Down we went, with the coils of candle smoke binding us together, and Lockwood calm and tireless at our head. For a while there was nothing but stone and smoke and silence, and the shuffle of our boots in the dark.

  “HURRY IT UP!”

  That was the skull roaring like a howler monkey in my ear. The sudden psychic outburst made me cry out with fright. I jerked forward, jabbing my candle flame directly into Holly’s neck. She cried out too, and barged into George; George stumbled and kneed Lockwood in the backside. Lockwood, who had just been bending over to inspect the step below, lost his balance entirely and tumbled down the stairs, falling head over heels, bump, bump, bump. He dropped his rapier, his candle disappeared over the edge. He finished upside down, long legs waving in the air.

  Dead silence. Everyone stood frozen, listening for the creak of moving traps, for shifting stones, for the rustling of casket cloths. Personally, all I could hear was the raucous cackling of the skull. Nothing happened. Lockwood got stiffly to his feet. Picking up his rapier, we hurried down to join him.

  “I don’t know what you’re so upset about.” This was the skull, a few moments later. We were clustering around the jar, bug-eyed and livid, while the face grinned out in high delight. “You know me,” it said. “I’m excitable. Can I help it if I get caught up in the action?”

  “You endangered us all,” I snarled. “If Lockwood had triggered a trap—”

  “But he didn’t, did he? Let’s be positive! We now know those last twelve steps are safe, because Lockwood’s bum tested them for us.”

  Oddly, when I passed on these words of wisdom, they didn’t go down well.

  “It’s gone too far this time,” Holly said. “I vote we take it to the furnaces tomorrow.”

  “Oh, don’t be so harsh,” Kipps said. “I’m grateful to the skull. That was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. I’ll treasure the memory on my deathbed. Anyway, I assume you haven’t brought the ghost along for its personality. The best thing is to put it to good use.”

  There was much sense in Kipps’s words, and everyone acknowledged it. I moved to the front of the group, just behind Lockwood, with the skull peering from the top of my backpack.

  “This is great,” it said. “The best seat in the house. With luck I can watch Lockwood trip over his own feet again. So, fill me in. What do you want me to do?”

  I took a deep breath. “Scour the rest of the stairs for snares, levers, wires, flip-stones, ghost-traps, and anything else that might threaten us. You see something, you let it rip. Otherwise keep silent. Not another word. Agreed?”

  “Okay.”

  “Then let’s g—”

  “STOP!” The skull’s scream was even louder than before.

  I cu
rsed. “What now?”

  “Hey, relax. Just doing my job. There’s a trap on the next step, I think you’ll find.”

  And sure enough, when I stabbed my flashlight on, I could see a thin wire stretched across the step below us, just at ankle height.

  “Trip wire,” George breathed.

  “Yes, and maybe something more than that.” Lockwood indicated where the wire disappeared into a small groove cut into the wall. He lifted his candle; one of the stones above was larger than the rest, and seemed less well embedded, too. “Think this might’ve dropped on our heads after we’d tripped and fallen?” he asked. “It’s possible.”

  Holly swallowed audibly. “Tell you what, let’s not find out.”

  One after the other we stepped down over the wire. The evident but unknown malice of the trap sent a chill through all of us. Lockwood wiped perspiration from his brow.

  “We owe the skull for that, at least,” he said. “Let’s keep on. It can’t be far to go.”

  We continued down the slowly curving stairs. The skull remained silent. There were no more dangers to be seen. At last our questing candlelight bent and folded against the carved stones of a wide, almost semicircular archway. The stairs stopped just short of the arch, ending at a paved expanse of floor.

  No one spoke. We were all on high alert. We used our psychic senses, probing ahead of us into the dark. Nothing was seen or heard. I ran my fingers over the walls, too, in case Touch might pick up something, but the stone was blank. Our thermometers showed a temperature of forty-four degrees: chilly, but not exceptional. It gave no cause for concern.

  That didn’t mean we were putting our rapiers away. Lockwood and I set down our candles and switched on our flashlights. With weapons at the ready, we walked slowly beneath the arch into a large stone room.

  The burial chamber of Marissa Fittes was a high, domed space, with an oval outline that echoed the shape of the mausoleum far above. Our flashlight beams crossed and recrossed it, picking out the same curved walls of closely fitting blocks, the same clean flagged floor. There were no doors, no niches, no alcoves to be seen. But in the middle of the vault…