The Empty Grave

by Jonathan Stroud

  “‘Marissa Fittes is a slim, bony girl with short-cropped hair and an attitude of unusual intensity. In clipped, confident tones she tells me of their strange supernatural experiences. “The dead are among us,” she says, “and they bring with them wisdom and secrets of the past.” She ignores my skepticism and tells me she has already written a monograph on the substance of spirits, which she terms “ectoplasm.” “It is the immortal stuff that is inside all of us,” she says. “Understanding it will bring great benefits to humanity. Perhaps, if we can exploit its transformative power, it will give us control over life and death.” At present, she admits regretfully, her ideas fall on stony ground. Having been unable to find a magazine that would accept her piece, she has had it printed at her own expense.’”

  George took a sip of tea. “See? Even then, right back at the beginning of her career, Marissa was interested in gaining control over life and death. I think that, somehow, she’s succeeded.”

  “Sounds like nonsense to me,” Kipps said. “The transformative power of ectoplasm? What’s that when it’s at home?”

  Lockwood was frowning. “There’s nothing about any of this in her published writings, is there? She doesn’t talk about plasm being ‘immortal stuff,’ as far as I can remember.”

  “No,” George said. “She goes all quiet about that. Which is why I’m particularly keen to track down this missing monograph of hers. It’s taken me months to get so much as a sniff of it. But today, I think I cracked it.” He gave us a look of triumph. “This morning, in a remote library, I found a reference to something called Occult Theories, by Anonymous. It doesn’t have Marissa’s name attached to it, but it was privately printed in Kent at about the correct time, and I bet it’s the one. Only three copies are known to exist. One is in the Black Library at Fittes House; one was bought by our old friends at the Orpheus Society for their private reading library; and one went to the Spiritualist Museum in Greenwich. The first two are obviously inaccessible, but I reckon I could fake my way into the last. In fact, I intend to, later this afternoon. If I can find this paper, it might just help us piece a few mysteries together.” George sat back in his chair. “I’ll try, anyway.”

  There was a general buzz of congratulation at this news. The only exception was the skull in the jar, which yawned and blew its cheeks out in cruel mimicry of George, but no one paid any attention. We all took more biscuits.

  Lockwood opened a fresh pack of digestives. “This is great,” he said. “If we can complete our picture of what Marissa’s been up to, we can go back to Barnes—or the newspapers—and make everything public. All we need is concrete proof.”

  George nodded. “And we also need to connect it to the wider Problem. I think I’ve cracked that, too.” He chuckled. “It’s a story of forbidden acts that takes us back more than fifty years.”

  “Pass me a pillow,” Kipps said. “This is going to take hours. I can feel it.”

  George pushed his glasses up his nose. “Oh, well, if that’s the way it is, Kipps, I can certainly keep it short and sweet. Here’s my analysis: I think Marissa Fittes and Tom Rotwell are to blame for the Problem. There. That’s it. The end.” He gathered up his papers and tapped them into a neat pile.

  Lockwood grinned. “All right, George. I’m sure Quill didn’t mean to sound so wearily contemptuous of all your hard work. Did you, Quill?”

  “No. It was purely coincidental.”

  “There. See? Everyone’s happy. George, have another raspberry biscuit and fill us in.”

  “Okay,” George said. “Well, we all know that Fittes and Rotwell started out as two psychic researchers in Kent. I’ve been through all the local papers. They’re first mentioned sixty years back, doing investigations here and there. As we’ve seen, no one took them seriously. A few years later, that had changed.”

  “Because of the Problem,” Holly said. “It had begun to spread.”

  George nodded. “Yep, and here’s the critical detail. The way you read it in Marissa’s Memoirs, the Problem was suddenly on the march, and Marissa and Tom were the only ones fighting it. Gradually their methods became accepted. Salt, iron, rapiers…the whole range of agency techniques started with them.”

  “Some famous cases,” I said. “The Mud Lane Phantom, the Highgate Terror…”

  “Precisely. The whole Fittes myth begins here.” George sat back in his chair. “But there’s another way of reading the data too, and to do this I had to map out all the places where Marissa and Tom were at work. What it shows is that those famous outbreaks—in other words, all the new ghosts that started cropping up—follow Marissa and Tom’s movements. If the two of them are active in a certain area, new hauntings tend to be reported soon afterward. And that can’t be a coincidence.”

  “So you think they were doing things to stir the ghosts up?” Holly said.

  “Yep.” George regarded us. “And what do we know for sure really stirs ghosts up?”

  I looked at Lockwood; a shadow had passed over his face. “Visiting the Other Side,” I said softly. “You think Marissa and Tom were doing this, all those years ago?”

  “Yes, though maybe Marissa found it easier than Tom. I’ll tell you why later.” George tapped one of the folders on the table. “As Lucy says, everyone knows the cases they investigated. They were a team for four or five years. But then—very suddenly and acrimoniously—they split up. No official word on why. Almost immediately, Marissa starts her own agency. A couple of months later, Tom Rotwell starts one, too. And their companies have been rivals ever since.”

  “Until now,” Lockwood said, “with Penelope in charge of both.”

  “We met Rotwell’s grandson a few months back,” George said. “What was he doing? He was making a gate to the Other Side. Remember all the paraphernalia he used? The stolen Sources, the clumsy armor the Creeping Shadow wore…It must have been years in the planning. It was big-scale stuff—big, but awkward, too. It smacks of someone who knew what he was about but was doing it the hard way. I think he was trying to copy something that his grandfather and Marissa had once done.”

  “Visit the Other Side?”

  “Right. Rotwell knew the theory, but he was having problems with the technique. On the one hand he was struggling to make a secret gate big enough—we know he created one under the Aickmere Brothers department store a year or so back, and by using it started the Chelsea outbreak. After that, he built one out in the countryside, which immediately caused the ghostly infestation of the local village. Sadly for him, we put an end to both experiments.”

  “We’re annoying that way,” Lockwood said, grinning.

  “Yes, and the armor his bloke used to protect himself on the Other Side—that was pretty hopeless, too,” George said. “Just compare it to the spirit-capes you and Lucy wore. You were far lighter on your feet. And those capes were mostly made of feathers. It’s safe to say that Rotwell was playing catch-up, but I’ll tell you someone who isn’t.”

  “Marissa?”

  “Precisely. She’s got some other system, and I think she’s been quietly using it for years and years without anybody noticing. She does it somewhere that’s nice and private, but also in the middle of things—and the epidemic’s been rippling outward from it all this time.” George took off his glasses with an air of finality. “No prizes for guessing where I think she’s doing it. You’re going there tonight.”

  “Fittes House,” Lockwood said. “Right by Trafalgar Square, the center of London.”

  “I would say so.”

  “But why?” Holly cried. “That’s what nobody’s been able to explain to me! Why take the risks? Why stir up the ghosts? If they know the terrible consequences, why do they keep on doing it?”

  “Whatever she’s up to,” George said, “it’s working. She’s rich, she’s powerful, and sixty years after starting out, she’s still here.”

  I got up to refill the kettle. Standing at the sink, I felt an impulsive desire to check that the garden was empty, that no one was
listening to us. I peeped through the blinds at our overgrown lawn, at the houses opposite, at the old apple tree by the wall. I had a sudden image of little Lockwood seeing his dead parents standing beneath it, many years before. There was nothing out there now, just long grass, and a few rotten apples in the shadows of the boughs. The garden was quiet. No one was near.

  “A moment ago, George,” Lockwood said, when our mugs were full again, “you said that Marissa might have always found it easier to visit the Other Side than Tom Rotwell. Why do you say that?”

  “She’s a Listener,” George said. “One of the two best there are.” He looked at me.

  I frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t go waltzing off to the Other Side.”

  “No. Though you have been there. Thing is, I’ve been puzzling over what advantage Marissa might have had, and again, the answer’s obvious. She talks to spirits. We know what that means: it brings you closer to them. After all, who, out of all of us, is closest to ghosts? Whose conversations with the skull gave us our most important clue?”

  Everyone slowly turned their head to look at me—Lockwood, Holly, and Kipps—not accusingly, exactly, but with thoughtful contemplation. It was deeply irritating. Even worse, the face in the jar was winking at me and nuzzling up against the glass in a decidedly overfamiliar way.

  “It’s like I’ve always told you, Lucy,” the skull said, “you and me, we’re a team. Hell, we’re more than that. We’re an item. Everybody knows it.”

  “We are not,” I growled.

  “Are so.”

  “In your dreams.” I glared at the others. “Don’t ask me what it just said. It’s not relevant to anything.”

  George adjusted his glasses. “Case in point. Marissa talks to ghosts in much the same way as you do. Only maybe in her case it’s not just lovers’ tiffs. Who knows what secrets they’ve given her, what mysteries of life and death.”

  I shook my head. “If so, she was lucky. This skull wouldn’t know a mystery of life and death if it walked up and sat on it.”

  “Hey, I give you plenty of good stuff! You just don’t have the wit to understand it.”

  “Oh, be quiet.”

  Lockwood had been watching the skull in silence for some time; now, he stirred. “I’m glad our friend’s feeling lively today,” he said. “I’d like to ask him something.” He regarded the jar. “So, Skull, you’ve often told us how you talked to Marissa, all those years ago….”

  The face rolled its eyes. “Yes, yes, I chatted with her once. I’ve said so enough times, haven’t I?”

  I passed on the essentials. “It says it did.”

  Lockwood nodded. “Just to be clear, you both spoke? It was a full conversation?”

  “That’s right, bub. Like this one, only more interesting.”

  “Yes, it was a full conversation.”

  “So how come Marissa didn’t keep you?” Lockwood asked.

  The face in the jar gave a start. “What?”

  “It says, ‘What?’” I said.

  “As in it didn’t hear me? Or didn’t understand?”

  “More like it was peeved. You definitely hit a nerve there, Lockwood.”

  “He so did not!”

  I nodded. “The skull’s sore about it. Definitely sore.”

  “I’m not sore!” the ghost said. “Not in the slightest. I simply don’t understand the relevance of the question.”

  I relayed this. “Well,” Lockwood said, “whenever I read Marissa Fittes’s Memoirs, I see she makes great play of having spoken with Type Three spirits. She goes on and on about how rare and fascinating it is.” He smiled at the ghost. “Which makes me wonder, Skull, why you ended up in a jar in the cellar for fifty years, after this one conversation.”

  “No need to wonder about that,” I said feelingly. “I’ve long been tempted to do the same with it.”

  “But you see my point. She knew the ghost’s value. It could have told her any number of secrets about the Other Side. Yet she chose to ignore it. Why?”

  “Skull?”

  “Search me.” The face still looked annoyed; the light in the eyes dwindled to a bright green ember. Then, as if from far away, it said, in a small, affectless voice, “I will say that she didn’t seem surprised at my being able to speak. At my robust language, yes. At some of my choicer suggestions about what she could do with herself, also. But at me actually speaking? No. It was old news as far as Marissa was concerned.”

  I repeated all this, as best I could. Lockwood nodded. “Remember that quote George read out just now—what did Marissa say? The dead ‘bring with them the secrets of the past’? She’d been chatting to another Type Three.”

  “It’s possible.” The skull gave a grunt. “How it could have been any more fascinating or informative than me, I can’t imagine.”

  “Well,” George said, “maybe the mysterious little book Occult Theories will shed some light on that. I’ll let you know tonight, when I get back from the library.” He began gathering up his papers. “That’s it for now,” he said. “I hope you thought it worth waiting for.”

  “George,” Lockwood said, “you’ve worked wonders. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

  Penelope Fittes, director of the great Fittes Agency, was not a publically-minded person. Despite her celebrity, she mostly confined herself to her apartments in Fittes House, the headquarters of the company on the Strand. True, she occasionally emerged for important ceremonies, such as the annual service for fallen agents at the tombs behind Horse Guards Parade. And she was sometimes glimpsed, black hair pinned back, dark glasses on, driving through the capital in her silver Rolls-Royce, on her way to appointments at the Sunrise Corporation or Fairfax Iron. But that was about it. Invitations to meet with her in private were not normally forthcoming. So the summons to Fittes House to hear Penelope speak on agency matters that evening was not one to be ignored, even if you weren’t interested in her. And we were interested, very deeply.

  Even so, only Lockwood and I attended, since Holly had a prior engagement. George was busy at the library. “We’ll compare notes tonight,” he’d said as he departed. “I’ll be back later, hopefully with the book. Meanwhile, you go and see Penelope—or Marissa—or whoever she is. Look her in the eyes, and tell me what you see.”

  What we saw when we arrived at the great gray building on the Strand were streams of operatives from our fellow agencies arriving in the dusk of early evening. There they all were: the lilac jackets of Grimble, the sky-blue ones of Tamworth, the striped pink blazers of Mellingcamp, and the rest. They congregated by the flower beds, where ranks of lilies had been planted in the shapes of rampant unicorns; they filed slowly through the etched glass doors. Traditionally, herding so many agents together would have been like shoveling a dozen tomcats into a sack and expecting them to cuddle up and keep the peace. Rivalry between companies was deeply ingrained, a function of their independence; in the past, chance encounters in the street often led to arguments and even duels. Tonight, with that independence threatened, the mood was different, wary and subdued. Doors were held open for old enemies; muttered greetings exchanged. Under the watchful gaze of many gray-jacketed Fittes agents, we shuffled through reception and into the conference hall.

  As the venue for her announcement, Ms. Fittes had chosen this mighty room, the Hall of Pillars. It was one of the most famous meeting places in London, a grand and gilded space, where marble floors and decorated ceilings showcased the wealth and history of the agency. Nine slender silver-glass pillars stood like birch trees at the center of the hall. Each contained an artifact of historic significance, a powerful psychic Source collected by ghost-hunting pioneers Marissa Fittes and Tom Rotwell during the infancy of the Problem. By day, electric lamps illuminated the relics for the wonderment of visitors; by night, the trapped spirits swam silently within the pillars. With the light failing outside, they were just beginning to stir.

  Lockwood and I took glasses of juice from silent attendants, a
nd meandered to a location on the fringes of the crowd. We studied the room. On a wall at the far end, a banner had been raised. It had the words THE FITTES INITIATIVE written on it in assertive black. Below stood a lectern on a little raised platform; this was covered with a drape emblazoned with a silver unicorn. It was almost identical to the one we’d found lying on Marissa’s coffin, in the crypt just up the road.

  Soon attendees had arrived from all the independent agencies (even Bunchurch, which in the absence of their leader was represented by two frightened-looking youths). The hall was almost full. The doors were closed, the lamps turned low. Within the glowing pillars, shadowy forms flared and darted like deep-sea fish. Servants entered, bringing canapés on silver trays.

  Lockwood took a petite spring roll and munched on it cheerfully. “Forget Tufnell’s place, Lucy,” he murmured. “Look at this. This is a proper bit of theater, right here.”

  I couldn’t be quite as calm as Lockwood—the announcement we were here for was unlikely to be a nice one—but I knew exactly what he meant. The room was perfect for its purpose, which was to overawe and subdue its guests. The crowd of agents was a vast and colorful array—their jackets resplendent, their rapiers glinting under the light of the chandeliers—and yet compared to the solid, unchanging majesty of the great gold hall, which effortlessly swallowed them all, they seemed somehow tawdry and fleeting, of little consequence. High above our heads, ceiling paintings showed legendary early agents, great martyrs of the Fittes Agency. The pillars were like the treasure houses of a king.

  “Better take off your bag, Luce,” Lockwood said. “Set it on the floor here, give it a decent view.”

  Unlike other companies in London, Lockwood & Co. had never bothered with a uniform, and we stood out again tonight. As usual Lockwood was smartly dressed in his suit and coat, while I wore my normal working outfit. I would have preferred to dress up a bit, too, but the large supply bag I carried on my back would have ruined the look. If anyone asked, I was to say I was on my way to a case, which was in fact true. We had two quick jobs in Soho to attend to on our way home.