The Empty Grave

by Jonathan Stroud

  “Got to be in here somewhere,” Lockwood said, spinning the globe gently. “So, it’s a book called Occult Theories that we’re after. Let’s get looking.”

  Holly set the lantern on the table. We spread out, scanning the shelves.

  It turned out that most of the books had been bound in black leather, with the Orpheus harp imprinted on the front. They also had the name of the author embossed on the spine and had been arranged alphabetically, but since the author of Occult Theories was officially anonymous, that didn’t help much. Time passed; occasionally I went to the door and listened, but everything seemed still.

  At last Holly sprang up from a shelf near the window, with a thin volume in her hand. “Got it!” she called. “Occult Theories! This is it for sure.”

  We gathered around her. “Yes, that’s it,” Lockwood said. “Well done, Hol. George will be pleased.”

  “He’d have loved this room,” I said. “So many weird books. Look at this one: Dark London, an Interim Cartography. What do you think that means?”

  “I don’t know, but—”

  “Did you hear something?” Holly asked.

  We looked at her. “Hear what?”

  “Don’t know. A clang somewhere.”

  I was closest to the door. I stole over, opened it, and looked out into the corridor. As before, the lights were low, the carpet soft and gleaming. I listened intently, but could hear nothing aside from the tick, tick, ticking of the clocks.

  “Skull?” I said.

  “No psychic disturbance. Everything’s quiet. Remarkably quiet.”

  “Good.”

  “One might almost say ominously quiet….”

  I came back in and shut the door. “We should get out while we can.”

  Lockwood nodded. “We’ll study the book at home. Come on.”

  We picked up our bags, silently scouring the room in case we’d left anything. Holly adjusted the globe so that it was in the same position as before. “Best to leave no traces,” she said, smiling. We gathered at the door.

  Except for Lockwood. He was staring at the bookshelf next to him. All at once he darted over and pulled something out. It was a thin pamphlet, bound in black leather.

  “More stuff about Marissa?” I said.

  “No….” He held up the spine to show us. The word LOCKWOOD was embossed on it in gold leaf. “It’s by my parents,” Lockwood said. “Remember last year, when we met the secretary of the society? He said my parents had once given a lecture here. This must be a transcript of it.” He flipped the pamphlet open to the first page.

  There was a vibration in my backpack. “I hear noises,” the skull said.

  “Noises? Where?”

  “Somewhere deep. But coming upward through the house.”

  “Lockwood—we’ve got to go.”

  “Yes, of course…” Lockwood’s voice trailed away. He stared at the pamphlet in his hand.

  “Lockwood?” I said. “Are you all right?”

  He didn’t answer; he didn’t hear me. It was like a switch had been thrown. His eyes were round and haunted. Something had altered in his face. His mouth hung open.

  Kipps was listening at the door. “Got no time for this! We’ve got trouble.”

  Now I could hear it, too: strange thuds and clattering approaching up the stairs.

  “Flashlights off!” I ran over to Lockwood and pulled at his arm. “Lockwood,” I snapped. “Come on.”

  “It’s their final lecture,” he said. “The one they were about to give when they died.”

  “Well, that’s great,” I said. “You wanted this, didn’t you? So take it and let’s go!”

  “But the date—”

  We were out of time. A great bang sounded in the corridor outside, making us all flinch back. There was an unholy screech, a scream of metal. The door blew open, and a hideous, deformed figure thrust itself inside.

  It was a nightmarish vision: gray, shiny, and impossibly large. So tall was the creature, it had to duck to get through the door. The eyes were bulbous, the legs insectlike, long and oddly jointed. The arms ended in enormous claws. It was silhouetted in the light of the corridor beyond. As it entered, it slashed at Kipps with its right hand, shearing through his jacket as he threw himself aside. Its left hand sought Holly, but she had dropped to the carpet, and only a few strands of her hair, trailing from the back of her ski mask, were sliced away as the claws swiped past.

  Lockwood and I stood directly in front of the shape as it stretched to its full height. Pistons hissed, metal squealed. Flashlight beams wheeled behind it, but the thing itself was dark. Our brains were trying to process what we were seeing. Not a ghost—too solid, too much iron for that. Monstrous, yes—but not a monster. At the heart of it, surely, was a man.

  “What is it, Terence?” a shrill voice called. “What’s in there?”

  “Thieves!” the thing shouted. “Burglars!”

  I knew the voice; and my guess was immediately confirmed, for at that moment Lockwood stabbed his flashlight on and shone it directly at the shape. The blaze revealed the secretary of the Orpheus Society, long white hair pluming out around a giant pair of goggles, a loose-fitting chain mail suit hanging over his dark coat. His feet and shins were encased in the top of a pair of pneumatic iron stilt-legs that adjusted, hissing, as he moved. His hands wore metal gauntlets, their fingers ending in foot-long stiletto claws. He cried out as the flashlight beam blinded him, raising one arm before his face.

  “Thieves!” he cried again. “Thieves in the research library!”

  “Then get out of the way, you old fool!” another voice cried. “Let us at them!”

  A hiss and a spring; with surprising agility, the secretary bounded aside. Clustering at the door behind him came four other misshapen forms, each one a gray-haired man or woman in old-fashioned evening dress, goggles strapped to faces, silver armor clinking. The two women carried peculiar firearms—black, snub-nosed, with coils of rubber hosing connecting them to chrome bottles fixed to the top of the devices. One of the men had a weapon that looked like a harpoon gun. His companion carried a boxlike device strapped to his back. A long piece of brass tubing protruded from it, looped over his shoulder and ended in a gaping funnel. All these items looked roughly made, with patches of soldering holding them together. Roughly made—but clearly functioning.

  The four lined up inside the door, with the secretary towering beside them. Holly had scuttled into the far corner of the library, beyond the globe; Kipps, one side of his jacket around his knees, had retreated to the other. I drew my rapier. I glanced at Lockwood, but his face was hidden, his emotions inscrutable. He tucked the pamphlet inside his coat, and let his hands drop by his side.

  For a moment nobody moved. One of the weapons gave a barking hum, like a vacuum cleaner revving. Otherwise the room was silent.

  “Who are you?” one of the woman said. She was very short and squarish, and the cut of her green tweed dress and jacket under her silver chain mail made her squarer still. She was one of those academic-looking ladies whose long gray hair would have been a lot more flattering if it had been cut and properly styled. But you wouldn’t have pointed this out to her, since her gun was bigger than her head. “Speak up!” she snapped. “Tell us your names.”

  There was no way we were going to answer that.

  “Agents!” the man with the harpoon gun spat. “Children! Look at their swords.”

  The secretary shifted position on his stilts; pistons hissed, steel claws clashed. “Give yourselves up!” he said. “Throw down your swords! If you do, we’ll let you live.” There was something in the way he phrased the words that made it instantly clear he intended us to die. But we could have guessed that anyhow. The Orpheus Society had its secrets to protect. They wouldn’t casually let us go.

  “I’m losing patience,” Harpoon Man said. He was quite bald, his skin leathery and lined. I thought perhaps he’d appeared in one of Kipps’s photos, but I couldn’t be sure. From memory, most of the m
embers looked like him. His male colleague, who by contrast possessed a wild beard that looked like an explosion in a lint factory, hefted his brass shoulder-funnel menacingly, taking especial aim at me.

  The secretary raised a gauntleted hand. “Not in here, Geoffrey,” he murmured. “The books…” He glared at us, flexing his metal claws. “Last chance!” he cried. “Do you have anything to say?”

  There was a pause. “Yes,” Lockwood said. “Actually, I do.”

  His voice surprised me. First, because I’d assumed we’d all remain silent—the secretary had, after all, met us before, and might recognize us from our words alone; secondly, because of the way he said it: quietly, yet with cold assurance, without fear, without haste, communicating utter unconcern. Whereas Kipps and Holly were as calm as cornered rats; whereas I teetered on toe-tips, desperate to dodge the inevitable attack, with sweat soaking into my mask, Lockwood looked as if he were waiting for a bus. He hadn’t drawn his rapier; he’d made no move for any weapon. A few feet away, gun barrels tilted toward him, the harpoon point swiveled, some unseen mechanism fizzed and hummed. Lockwood just stood there.

  He said, “You have a choice before you. You can either turn around, leave this room, and go back downstairs, or not. Which do you want to do?”

  The second woman, tiny, dark, and wrinkled as a currant, cocked her head in puzzlement. “Sorry—is he talking to us?”

  “Giving us an ultimatum?” Harpoon Man took a firmer grip on the handle of his gun.

  “You’re elderly,” Lockwood said, “and perhaps a little slow. If it isn’t clear enough, I can put it another way for you. Get your shriveled backsides out of here sharpish while you can, or face the consequences. It’s pretty simple. Up to you.”

  The tiny woman’s body shook with emotion inside her silver armor; she gave a hoot of rage. Again the bearded man—Geoffrey—seemed inclined to do something hasty with the shoulder-funnel. Harpoon Man and the tweedy woman both took impulsive steps toward us, too, but were blocked by the stooping figure of the secretary.

  “No,” he said, swinging a leg forward. “Let me.”

  “Take his head off, Terence,” the wrinkled woman said.

  Few non-spectral situations are as fearsome as being cornered by a deranged senior on stilts, with his ten steak-knife fingers clawing in your direction. Fearsome, yet also faintly ridiculous; and Lockwood’s air of calm defiance had successfully communicated itself to all of us. It had allowed us to take stock, and realize that something the secretary had said had given us an advantage.

  While in this room, the Orpheus members were unwilling to use their heavy weaponry for fear of damaging their library.

  We had no such qualms.

  We all reached for our belts. Lockwood moved the quickest—too quick for the eye to follow. The first the secretary knew about it was when the magnesium flare struck him full in the chest, exploding against his chain mail and sending him toppling backward behind a waterfall of cascading silver light. With frantic contortions and desperate footwork, he contrived to remain standing, but my own flare, arriving instants later, propelled him sideways to tip over the back of an armchair. As his legs thrashed at the ceiling, Kipps’s and Holly’s flares burst against the four figures at the doorway, sandwiching them violently together and causing the man with the harpoon gun to pull his trigger, so that his missile shot between Lockwood and me and straight out through the window behind us. It shattered the glass, letting the night air in.

  After that, things got messy.

  Really, it was a pity for the members of the society that they were still blocking the way out—otherwise we might have been inclined to leave them. It was a pity too that in their rage they forgot their sensible intention of safeguarding their research library, and began to fire their weapons. It had bad consequences for them.

  The gray-haired woman with the tweed jacket raised her gun, and a jag of bright blue electricity suddenly connected its nozzle with the wall beside my head. One moment it wasn’t there, the next it was. It cut across the room like a scribble drawn by a giant child. I felt its force, smelled the burning wallpaper. Sparks fizzed against my jacket and stung my cheeks. She turned the gun, scything the light toward me. I threw myself over the table beside the plaster bust and rolled away behind an armchair. Behind me something exploded; fragments of the bust cascaded to the floor.

  I peered around the chair. Both women were now firing their guns; the blue flashes cast everything else into semidarkness. There was movement everywhere, the shimmer of rapiers, the rush of bodies. Another flare burst; in its light, I saw the secretary getting to his feet. His face was a Venn diagram of black and silver scorch marks. His hair smoldered; one strand of it was on fire.

  At my shoulder, the skull gave a long, low chuckle. “These old geezers are completely mad! I’ve got to say I like them.”

  A masked figure—Kipps, I guessed—moved past, sword drawn, to be at once confronted by the bearded Geoffrey. His funneled apparatus was connected to a concertinaed bladder, like a bellows or accordion, strapped under one arm. He jabbed this with his elbow; with a pop!, a glass vial shot from the end of the funnel, missed Kipps by inches, and shattered on the wall behind. Colorless liquid dripped down; a familiar fragrance filled the air.

  “Is that the best you can do?” Kipps called. “Lavender water? Pathetic!”

  “I have to agree,” the skull said. “That’s the wimpiest weapon I’ve ever seen.”

  I grasped the neck of Kipps’s jersey, pulled him sharply down behind the chair. The watery substance was eating into the wallpaper, making it bubble and foam; small bits of plaster dropped in wet gobbets to the floor.

  “Possibly a bit of acid in there, too,” I said.

  “Nice!” the skull said. “They’re totally insane!”

  Kipps and I took hold of the armchair, driving it forward, sending it forcefully into Geoffrey. He gasped in pain. The funnel popped; a vial of acid ricocheted off the ceiling and burst nearby. Elsewhere in the room, someone screamed. I had time to hope it wasn’t Holly. And now here came the tiny wrinkled woman, firing her gun indiscriminately. A bolt of blue stabbed straight through the chair and out the other side, and my hands tingled with an electrical charge. I let go of the chair. Running low, I rushed the woman, striking her around the waist, bringing us both to the floor. Her grip on the gun was loosened; I sent it flying from her hand.

  Shadows moved nearby. I looked up; there was Harpoon Man, struggling to load another dart into his weapon. There too was the secretary, vertical at last and bearing down on me. And there was Lockwood, who stood directly in his path, in the center of the smoking floor. He had his rapier in his hand. The secretary gave a cry; he slashed downward with his claws, finger-knives raking at Lockwood’s head. Lockwood moved balletically aside; his rapier struck them away. He kicked the closest stilt-leg, sending the secretary skittering away to collide with the other man.

  Beneath me, the tiny woman was wriggling frantically, snarling and spitting.

  “Criminals!” she shrieked.

  “Maybe,” I said, punching her in the jaw, “but at least we’re not lunatics, like you.”

  And so it was that the members of the Orpheus Society discovered a curious thing. It was understandable that they were a little grouchy; what with that, and their superior firepower, they’d probably assumed they would win the day. But crazed as they were, they couldn’t match the ferocity that now erupted from all four of us. I’d never punched an old lady before; I didn’t have any problem doing so now.

  In a way, they were unlucky, for our reaction didn’t really have a lot to do with them. It had been building in us for days, ever since George had gotten hurt. Our anger needed an outlet, and here were some senior citizens in armor trying to kill us. That pretty much fit the bill.

  During the next few minutes, we notched up many firsts. There was Lockwood, slicing off the secretary’s metal fingers, from first one gauntlet, then the other. There was Kipps, grappling with Ge
offrey, pulling at his beard and upending him. As the man sought to rise, Kipps stuck his rapier straight into the motor of his opponent’s funnel-gun, so that it exploded in a ball of pulsing light. And there was Holly, dodging the savage blows of the tweedy woman; leaping across to the giant wooden globe and shoving it over, so that it pinned the woman to the floor.

  Me, I’d gotten up, retrieved the discarded electrical gun, and switched on the dial. The tiny woman in silver armor had likewise struggled to her feet. She rushed at me, shrieking. I flicked the trigger, sending out a jolt of electric current that blew her straight through the nearest wall in a shower of bricks and plaster.

  Geoffrey lay unconscious beneath the smoking, twisted coils of his brass funnel. Harpoon Man, however, had readied his gun again. He leveled it at Kipps. Holly screamed a warning. Kipps ducked; the bolt shot over his head. I hit the man with another blast from the electrical gun that sent him back into a chair and the chair back into a bookcase. It toppled over, burying him.

  The skull uttered whoops of glee. “This is great. You’re just as bad as them! Worse, in fact. They don’t know what’s hit them!”

  And the tide of the battle was turning. The tweedy woman had wriggled out from under the globe. She fled for the door. So, too, did the secretary, hissing and clanking on his stilts, swinging his clawless metal hands. They arrived at the door at the same time, and fought with each other to be the first one through. Lockwood and I walked after them, he with his rapier, me holding the gun. Out into the corridor we went, toward the landing, stepping over the dust and debris and scattered bricks; also the unconscious body of the tiny woman, which was lodged half in and half out of the wall.