The Empty Grave

by Jonathan Stroud

  Didn’t bother me. I had plenty of canisters. I chucked another one, setting more plasm alight. The apparition shivered, lost its focus. Its set smile began to fall away.

  Somewhere far off, a door banged. That would be Holly, not far behind.

  The woman held out her hands. “Come….”

  “Oh, get lost.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have used the magnesium flare, but I’d had enough of the ghost by then. It was too selfish, too needy, too vacuous. I didn’t want to share psychic space with it a moment longer. And it had tried to take Lockwood from me. Tufnell could always get himself a new stage. The explosion hit it directly from below—flames went right through its body, blowing the head like a kettle lid high into the air. Half the plasm was vaporized instantly in the blast; the remainder was frail and faint, the merest outline, the ghost of a ghost. I watched as it fled across the stage, diminishing as it went, the head pulled after it on strings of plasm. As it went, the bright dress dwindled, the white limbs shriveled up; the open sword wounds in the body glinted like black stars. It dived toward one of the big wooden cubes, merged into the wood, and vanished.

  “Where is it?” Black hair streaming behind her, Holly raced across the burning stage. “Where is it? Where’d it go?”

  I didn’t look at her. “That yellow box!” I said. “The Source is in there! Find it! Seal it up!” With that, I cast the ghost from my mind. I stood in front of Lockwood, looking up at him. How pale and cold his skin was when I took his hand. His eyes were almost blank; almost, but not quite. I could see his consciousness like a twist of smoke, drifting in the depths.

  “Lockwood!” I slapped him hard across the cheek.

  Somewhere behind me came a series of violent crashes. That was Holly, getting to work on the box.

  “Lockwood…” My voice was cracking. “It’s me.”

  “Luce!” That was Holly, too. “I found something! I’ve got my silver chain net….”

  I spoke softly now. “It’s me. It’s Lucy….”

  I like to think it was just coincidence that Holly laid the silver net over the Source right then. I like to think it was the sound of my name that brought him back. Who’s going to tell me otherwise? Either way, the twist of smoke rose up and up, and bloomed across the surface of his eyes. Intelligence came with it; intelligence and recognition—and something more than that. He smiled at me.

  “Hey, Luce…”

  I slapped him again, sharply and on both cheeks. Take it from me, that’s a hard thing to get right when you’re crying.

  It was afterward said that at the very moment Holly wrapped the silver net around the bloodstained tiara hidden in the box, at that very moment out in Tufnell’s caravan on the far side of the field, little Charley Budd stopped howling, sat up, and asked for chicken soup. So the theater people knew instantly that we’d gotten the job done and the ghost was gone. Their subsequent emergence into the auditorium, step by cautious step, was nicely timed, as we were just battling the fire I’d started on the stage. All hands came to help. By dawn, the blaze was out, the theater safe, and the tiara wrapped, ready for destruction in the furnaces. And Sarah Parkins, the stage manager who had built the secret compartment that concealed the Source, and who had promptly admitted to putting it there, was locked in her trailer under the watchful gaze of two of the burliest trapeze artists, awaiting the arrival of the DEPRAC vans.

  For Mr. Tufnell, it was a satisfactory end to the affair, though he groaned to high heaven about the magnesium burns in the center of the stage. Sarah Parkins’s guilt had likewise dumbfounded him. “To think she should be the cause of all this!” he cried, his face beet red with emotion. “Such betrayal! Such malice! I treated her like a daughter!”

  “Actually, it wasn’t about you,” Lockwood said. Seeming none the worse for his recent psychic enchainment, Lockwood himself had identified the culprit and invited her to confess. He had subsequently spent half an hour talking to her in the caravan. “Sarah told me what happened,” he went on. “It was originally about Sid Morrison. You mentioned yourself, Mr. Tufnell, that Sarah had been fond of him, but by your own account he’d fallen head over heels for that Russian trapeze artist with the thighs. Sarah was left rejected, and her heartbreak turned into hatred. She wanted revenge. It so happened that in her work clearing out the prop supplies, she’d discovered a relic of La Belle Dame’s last performance—the tiara she’d worn for The Sultan’s Revenge. All those years it had been kept in an iron box, which must have suppressed the ghost. Without recognizing its psychic significance, Sarah took it out. Subsequent sightings of the Specter—and its particular interest in young men—made her realize its potential. She hid the tiara onstage and awaited developments. It wasn’t long before Charley Budd was snared, but Sarah didn’t want him dead—that’s why she saved him. Sid Morrison, a day later, wasn’t so lucky.”

  “Hold on,” Holly said. “Why didn’t she remove the tiara after Sid’s death? Why risk other people’s lives?”

  Lockwood shook his head. “It’s hard to say. Sarah claims she hadn’t had the opportunity. Personally, I wonder if her private misery had morphed into a dull hatred for the world in general. Or perhaps she found she simply liked the secret power….But that’s a matter for Inspector Barnes, not us. Here he is now. I’ll fill him in.”

  Looking at Lockwood then, as he strode across to meet the DEPRAC contingent, coat swinging behind him, so confident and self-assured, you’d have been hard-pressed to imagine that an hour or two before he’d been a ghost’s plaything. His smile was as bright as ever, his energy lit up the stage. A little crowd gathered to listen. Old Inspector Barnes, crumpled and hangdog as usual, hung on his every word. George and Kipps were there, too, standing on the sidelines, luxuriating in everyone’s goodwill.

  Only Holly and I hung back. In my case this was partly due to exhaustion, partly delayed shock at the drastic action I’d had to take to save Lockwood. I simply didn’t feel like joining in. Holly was fine, but she could see the state I was in and wanted to keep me company.

  I watched Lockwood through a fog of weariness. From the moment he awakened, he’d seemed his normal self. But I knew what I’d seen when I looked into his spellbound eyes.

  They’d been no different to those of Charley Budd. And what had George said about Charley—him and the other victims? They had weak connections to life. Enchainment worked on those who, one way or another, were already somehow looking to the next world. The ghost had tried it on me, too. I’d wavered, I’d felt the pull. But Lockwood? He’d fallen for it, big-time. It didn’t matter how sprightly he seemed now. For a few short minutes, he’d been back in that overgrown cemetery with his family. He’d been walking toward that empty grave.

  An hour later we were standing at the gates to Tufnell’s Traveling Fairground, waiting for the Night Cabs to take us home. Kipps had gotten hot teas from a bearded lady who seemed to like him. He, George, and Holly were huddled together, sipping from plastic cups. I stood slightly apart, coat wrapped tight around me, looking south toward the river. You could just see the Thames from here, glinting in broken shards beyond the factory chimneys. It was a cold morning.

  Lockwood came to stand beside me. We stood in silence, shoulders touching, watching the gray city grow sharp and definite, hardening into a new day.

  “I haven’t said a proper thank-you,” Lockwood said.

  “It’s all right.”

  “I know what you did for me.”

  My mouth tightened. “Swung down on a bloody trapeze was what I did, Lockwood.”

  “I know.”

  “I hate heights.”

  “I know that.”

  “I hate trapezes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t ever make me have to do something so ridiculous and dangerous again.”

  “Lucy, I won’t. I promise.” He offered me a sidelong grin. “But listen—you were amazing. Holly told me. Kipps, too—he saw the part from when you landed on the crash pad.”
/>   “Oh, he didn’t see that bit, did he? God.”

  “You saved my life.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Thank you.”

  I wiped my nose with a gloved hand, sniffed at the coldness of the air. “We shouldn’t have split up the way we did, Lockwood. And you shouldn’t have been there at all. I told you and George before we came. You were vulnerable to that thing.”

  He let out a long, slow breath. “From what George tells me, you were, too.”

  “I was, it’s true. I was thinking about my sisters—and other things like that. It sensed my sadness and took advantage.” I looked at him. “What were you thinking about when it appeared to you?”

  Lockwood pulled his collar up against the chill. He wasn’t very good with direct questions like that. “I don’t really remember.”

  “You were so far gone when I got to you. You were completely snared. At the end, even after I chopped the thing’s head off, you were still mooning over it.”

  The DEPRAC vans came through the gates and pulled away, lights flashing, brakes squealing. There was Barnes, following in his car. He waved a lugubrious hand.

  Lockwood didn’t speak until everything was quiet again. “I know you’re worrying about me, Luce,” he said. “But you really mustn’t. These things happen when you’re an agent. You’ve been snared by ghosts in the past, haven’t you? There was the one that made the bloody footprints, and the thing in the tunnels below the Aickmere Brothers store. But it’s fine, because I helped you then, and you’ve helped me now. We’re there to help each other. If we do that, we’ll get through.”

  Which was a lovely thing to say, and it made me feel a little warmer. I just had to hope it was true.

  Back at Portland Row, normality was resumed, which meant arguments about who paid the taxi fare, three helpings of breakfast each, and George hogging the hot water in the bathroom. Kipps and Holly had gone to their respective homes; midmorning saw George, Lockwood, and me all sleeping late. When I woke up again, sometime after noon, the first thing I saw was the ghost-jar, still protruding from the top of my backpack where I’d slung it on my bedroom chair. It was tilted at an angle, thanks to a fair-sized pile of dirty laundry, and the spectral face inside was staring at me like I’d just shot its grandmother.

  Strangely, it was a reassuring sight. I flicked the lever and sat blearily on the end of the bed, tousled and comatose, letting the shrill complaints flow over me.

  “I didn’t shut you off this time,” I said, when I could finally get a word in edgeways. “It was the ghost.”

  “So? It’s still your fault! You can’t let any old ghost woman go around fingering my jar. It’s your responsibility to look after it. I can’t do it, can I? I’m in your care. I call it negligence, pure and simple.”

  “You’re not a child. Get over it.” I scratched at my hair; the white strands were showing no sign of growing out. Maybe I’d have to dye them. “Skull,” I said suddenly, “I’m worried about Lockwood.”

  The ghost seemed taken aback. “Lockwood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hey, you know me. I love him like a brother.” The face adopted an expression of unctuous fake concern. “What seems to be the problem?”

  I stretched my legs out in front of me, rocking on the edge of the bed. I thought of Lockwood in the cemetery; and of him walking toward the ghost. I also thought of the Fetch beneath the Aickmere Brothers store that had worn his face, almost a year before. It had predicted Lockwood’s death and said that he would die for me. Oh, and there was the fortune-telling machine the night before. That hadn’t cheered me much, either. I sighed. “I don’t understand what’s driving him at the moment,” I said. “Mostly he seems absolutely fine, but underlying it all…I’m not sure what he’s really looking for. It might be something that’s not…that’s not that healthy….” I let the effort peter out. It was no good. I couldn’t say it.

  “Well, thanks for that,” the skull said, after waiting to make sure I’d really finished. “A probing analysis. And about as clear as a bucketful of mud.”

  I shook my head, suddenly annoyed with myself. What was I thinking? I couldn’t talk to a haunted skull about Lockwood’s parents or the graveyard. The idea was absurd. “I know you don’t care,” I said, “but I just wondered if you’d noticed anything….” I got up, reaching for a towel. “Forget it. It’s not important.”

  “I mean, it’s not as if I’m renowned for my empathy, anyway,” the ghost said. “It’s a long time since I was alive. I’ve forgotten what it feels like, having mortal motivations. And of course I hardly know Lockwood at all.”

  “It’s all right. It’s not a problem.”

  “Aside from his recklessness, his deep-rooted feelings of personal loss, his mild self-absorption, his obsession with his family, and his obvious death wish, I couldn’t tell you anything about him. You and me, we’re just as clueless as each other, eh?” the skull added. “Ah, well.”

  I paused with the towel in my hand. “What did you say? Don’t be ridiculous. He doesn’t have a death wish.”

  “Fine, you’re not comfortable with it. I understand that. We’ll let it drop.” The skull began humming a light tune. “Actually, no we won’t. It’s surely obvious to everyone. He’s always had it. It’s practically his middle name. And maybe it’s more pronounced than ever now, thanks to what happened to you both. Don’t forget, you’ve both been to the Other Side. That’ll have had its effect too, you know.” The face grinned at me, eyes narrowing to slits. “Why do you think La Belle Dame tried her luck with you last night? You’re not a boy.”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but it was true. Of all her potential victims, I’d been the only girl. Still, true or not, somehow the skull’s insights always made me angry. “I should have known better than to try and talk to you,” I said, bending close to the jar. “Lockwood’s got plenty to live for. Plenty.”

  The face regarded me. “Has he? What would that be, I wonder? Give it a name.”

  With that, the ghost did something to the light inside the ichor, so that it dimmed and went opaque, and I found myself staring at my own distorted face in the side of the jar.

  “Care to comment?” the skull said.

  I cursed and walked away. “No! I don’t need to explain myself to a tatty bit of old bone! And I certainly don’t need to second-guess Lockwood’s motivations!”

  “You so do,” the ghost called. “It’s your favorite hobby! And think about it—if you ever actually freed me, you’d never have to talk to me again!”

  Its words bounced off the closing bathroom door.

  George and Lockwood were in the library when I went downstairs. Lockwood’s long limbs were draped across his favorite armchair as he read the newspaper. George was hunched nearby, inspecting a small sheaf of papers; on the floor at his feet lay a piece of unfolded oilcloth and a length of filthy string. Funny—in all the immediate flurry after our encounter with Sir Rupert, the package Flo Bones had given George had never been mentioned again. He hadn’t brought it up, and I’d forgotten to ask him.

  I threw myself into a chair. The library being chilly, the fire was lit and blazing.

  “More news,” Lockwood said, from behind the newspaper.

  “Bad or baddish?”

  “Baddish, bad, and interesting. Sometimes in combination.”

  “Oh, just tell me what it is.”

  “Remember the other day, George mentioning old Adam Bunchurch?”

  “What, getting all furious with the Fittes Agency for trying to close him down?”

  “That’s right. Well, he’s dead.”

  “What? Ghost-touch?”

  “No. He was attacked last night. Exactly what happened is unclear. He was on his way home from handling a Lurker case in Rotherhithe. Walking alone. Someone lay in wait for him. They beat him up and left him. No one found him until morning. He was taken to the hospital, but died there.”

  I glanced across at George. “No c
lue as to who did it, I suppose?”

  Lockwood didn’t speak for a moment. “Maybe the police will make an arrest. I don’t know.”

  I didn’t comment. It didn’t seem particularly likely.

  “The next thing to tell you is also fairly ominous.” Lockwood tossed the paper aside. “We got an official letter this morning from DEPRAC. Tomorrow evening all the heads of the small independent agencies are requested to report to Fittes House, where Penelope Fittes is going to make an announcement. Six p.m.” He glanced across at me.

  “Closing us all down?”

  “It doesn’t say.”

  “Things are certainly happening,” George said. He was still engrossed in his papers.

  “They are,” Lockwood said. “And speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to tell you both. At the theater this morning Inspector Barnes came up to me and shook me by the hand.”

  “Doesn’t sound like him,” I said. “Was he ill?”

  Lockwood glanced at his palm and wiped it on his knee. “I do hope not. No, he was thanking us for our sterling efforts. But that’s not all. He gave me something, too.”

  He stretched over and handed me a piece of paper. On it were the words:

  17 Alma Terrace, NW1, 8 p.m. tonight

  “He wants a meeting?” I said.

  Lockwood grinned. “A secret one! Might be a bit more hush-hush if it wasn’t scribbled on official DEPRAC notepaper and in Barnes’s own spidery handwriting, but there you are.”

  “So are you going?” I asked.

  “I think we all should. What do you think Barnes wants, George?”

  “Mm?” There was a gleam behind George’s spectacles as he looked up. His eyes were bright, but his mind was focused on something far away. “Oh, he’ll be telling us to keep out of trouble, stop poking our noses into things that don’t concern us….” He inspected the documents in his hand. “Well, too late for that now.”

  “Okay, what are those, George?” I said. “And how come Flo gave them to you?”