The Empty Grave

by Jonathan Stroud

  The fugitives reached the landing, at the head of the stairs. As the woman turned to go down, I caught her with a bolt of electricity that sent her through the banisters and out over the stairwell to land on a chandelier. There she swung, senseless and dangling, in a mess of crystal shards and smoking tweed.

  Here too the secretary made his final stand. Perhaps with his stilts he couldn’t easily descend the stairs; perhaps his desperation had turned to defiance at the last. Either way, he turned and held his ground, as Lockwood approached, calm and remorseless, rapier at the ready.

  “You’ll die for this!” the old man cried. “She’ll make you pay!”

  He swung out blindly with an arm. Lockwood moved to the side and sliced with his sword. He chopped neatly through the right stilt-leg. The secretary toppled over the ruined banisters and kept going, out and down. He missed the chandelier; anyway, it was already taken. A moment later there was a heavy impact on the stairs below.

  Silence in the house of the Orpheus Society. The gun in my hand was emitting a gentle hum. I switched it off, let it fall to the floor. The chandelier and its occupant swung steadily around and around.

  “Oh, is that it?” the skull said. “I was enjoying that. Bit of senseless violence does wonders for morale. You should break in somewhere every night. There are heaps of old people’s homes in London. Let’s choose another one tomorrow.”

  Kipps and Holly picked their way among the debris in the corridor to join me on the landing. Lockwood had gone downstairs to check on the crumpled body of the secretary. A power pack on the man’s back was spurting out intermittent bright blue sparks.

  I looked down through the shattered banisters. “Is he dead?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t think any of them are,” Kipps said.

  Below me, Lockwood stood up slowly. He nudged a limp hand aside with his boot and stepped past the secretary without another glance. He ascended the stairs, pale-faced, dusty, torn of coat, rapier in hand. Only on reaching the landing did he reattach it to his belt.

  “Can we go now, please?” Holly asked in a small voice.

  Lockwood nodded. “Definitely. But first we need to pay another visit to that storeroom upstairs.”

  It was shortly after two a.m. when we arrived back at Portland Row. It was silent in the house; nothing could be heard from George or Flo.

  Lockwood held a heavy bag, containing certain items we’d taken from the storeroom. He lowered it onto the kitchen table, then pulled off his ski mask. There was blood on his face. He scratched at his flop of hair. “Check the front, Hol,” he said. “See if anyone’s watching the house. Masks off, everyone. Gloves, too. We’ll need to get rid of these.”

  We threw the masks and gloves down by the door. Kipps took off his ruined jacket and chucked it on the pile. Holly came back from the living room.

  “Can’t see anyone out there,” she said.

  Lockwood nodded. “Good enough.”

  We stood in semidarkness. The smell of smoke rose from our tattered clothes. Our faces and hands were bruised and bloodied, our expressions blank. The same thought was going through all our minds.

  “So…think they recognized us?” Kipps said at last.

  We all looked at Lockwood. He was very pale and there was a cut on one of his cheeks.

  “Probably not,” he said. “But I’m afraid that they—or Fittes, or Sir Rupert Gale—will put two and two together very quickly indeed. They’ll know it was us for sure. And they’ll have to act on it. Which makes it only a matter of time before—”

  “Before what?” I asked.

  Lockwood smiled at me. “Before the end. But it’s not going to happen tonight. Which means we should get some sleep. That’s the first rule of any agency—rest when you can.”

  All very true, but I didn’t sleep well or long. I was awake at dawn and walking around the quiet house. I thought Lockwood would be sleeping on the couch in the living room, but the door was open, the room empty.

  I looked into the library. The curtains were drawn back and light was coming in, pale white and cold. There was a smell of woodsmoke, but the fire had burned out and the air was chilly. Lockwood sat in his favorite chair, his reading light shining over his shoulder. It made a small, harsh circle of brightness on his lap. The other pamphlet we’d stolen from the Orpheus Society lay facedown between his hands. He had his eyes half open, and was staring toward the window.

  I sat beside him on the arm of the chair, and switched off the light. “Not been to bed?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I’ve been reading my parents’ last lecture.”

  I waited. If he wanted to tell me, he would.

  “‘Ghost Lore among the Tribes of New Guinea and West Sumatra,’” he said. “‘A presentation given to the members of the Orpheus Society by Celia and Donald Lockwood.’ That’s what it says on the frontispiece, Lucy. Word for word. Spells it out nice and clear. It was their calling card, if you like. They’d wanted to join the society. That nice man, the secretary of the society, even complimented me on their talk when we went there last year.”

  I had a vision of that white-haired thing on stilts, the screaming face, the slashing claws. “You know, maybe it’s best they never joined,” I said. “Not sure they would have fit in.”

  Lockwood picked up the book gently. “I should apologize to you,” he said. “To you, Hol, and Quill, for what happened back there, just before those idiots attacked us. I’m sorry. I let you down.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “You were—”

  “I was frozen,” Lockwood said. “I went into shutdown mode. I’m your leader, and that’s not right. But I had an excuse,” he added, “because I was very surprised by something. No, surprised isn’t the word. I suddenly understood a whole lot of things. They came in a rush, and rather overwhelmed me. And—well, I can show you what it was.” He opened the little book, turned the yellowed pages. “It’s two things together, really,” he said. “Most of this lecture is exactly what its title suggests. It gives an account of how the people of those places deal with ancestral spirits. There’s lots about how the bones of the dead are stored in special spirit houses set away from the village, so they’re kept out of trouble. And how the shamans or witch doctors dress up in spirit-capes, like the ones we’ve got upstairs, and go to the houses to consult the ancestors. That’s not so new. They talked about that in other papers, as you know. But then my mother and father home in on what they think is going on in those spirit houses….”

  He had found the extract he wanted; he already knew the piece by heart. He smoothed out the page and, holding it up to catch the frail light of morning, gave it to me to read:

  So the wise men truly converse with the ancestors: that is one point on which they all insist. But there is another point, too, even more incredible to the modern ear. When they enter the spirit houses, so the wise men believe, they are no longer in the mortal world at all, but have passed through to another realm altogether. This is the realm of the ancestors, the land of death, where they can meet with ghosts on level terms. “How can this be?” we asked them. “How can your mortal bodies withstand the terrible conditions there (for it is not a pleasant place), and would not the proximity of the dead be fatal to you?” “All this would indeed be true,” came the reply, “were it not for the stout protection afforded by our cloaks and masks. The precious materials of the cloaks shield our bodies and keep the ancestors from touching us. The bone masks (formed from the remains of shamans of the past) allow us to see the spirits with clear eyes.”

  To our mind, these fragile items look scarcely capable of any of this, but the wise men are confident in their power. Yet even so, speaking with the ancestors is not to be taken lightly. The elders regard it as a most dangerous venture to be undertaken only in times of crisis, for the dead are roused to great excitement by their arrival, often following them back into the living world. This is why the spirit houses are built away from the villages, usually across stream
s.

  “You see what they’re stumbling toward, Lucy?” Lockwood said. “They’re recording the exact same thing that’s going on here—the living traveling to the land of the dead. They’ve spotted everything: the way the dead get stirred up, the importance of having lots of Sources piled together to create a gate through, the need for bodily protection on the Other Side. It’s all there.”

  I nodded slowly. “The bit about the bone masks is interesting,” I said. “You think they operate like the goggles Kipps has?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, maybe. Though I bet the goggles are copying the masks, in just the same way that those silver capes we nicked are close copies of the original spirit-capes. My poor parents go on to describe the feathered capes in great detail—the way they’re made, the types of silver mesh holding them together…This was a gift for the Orpheus gang, Luce. Whatever techniques they were using beforehand won’t have held a candle to these. They’ve been taking a leaf out of my parents’ book ever since.”

  “They’ve been using their findings?”

  “I’m sure of it. And I’m sure of something else, too. They may have been delighted to hear all about the clever techniques used by the shamans, but they wouldn’t have been at all pleased about another remark in the lecture.” Lockwood flipped forward a couple of pages, to near the end of the little book. “Read this,” he said. His voice sounded odd.

  From what we have seen and heard firsthand, both in the New Guinean hill country and the forests of West Sumatra, we are convinced of the truth of the wise men’s accounts in the matter of their ancestors. More than that, we feel that they have much to teach us about our own problem with our ancestors, much closer to home. We all know that the epidemic of Visitors that Britain endures is mysterious and worsening, without apparent solution. Yet could it be that the prime cause of this crisis is somewhere near us, right under our noses? Are we, somehow, disturbing these spirits? Could there be a gate, such as we have described, with mortal traffic going through it? The idea seems absurd, and yet surely it satisfies the evidence. We feel this theory must be explored. Indeed, we devoutly believe that our researches, made at the other ends of the earth, have the potential to unlock great mysteries near at hand.

  “Of course, we know there were spirit gates near at hand,” Lockwood said. “And we know precisely who’s been going through them. My mother and father didn’t have a clue. Can you imagine them in that cursed building, giving this talk, with the clocks ticking and those horrible Orpheus people quietly watching them?” He shuddered. “It was the wider picture, the stuff about the Other Side, that interested my mum and dad. The parallels between cultures. They thought, quite reasonably, that these ideas might inspire a bit of public interest at home in Britain. In fact, they planned to give that same lecture to a public audience in Manchester a few days later. The thing they didn’t know, being all excited and eager, and wanting to give their special friends at the society a little preview of their theories, was that they were signing their own death warrants.”

  His tired eyes looked up at me; our gazes locked.

  “The accident,” I said.

  “Given what they were up to, the Orpheus Society would have been very disinclined to have my parents’ lecture heard by the world,” he said. “Which brings me to the second thing I realized. The front page of the pamphlet gives the date of the lecture. It’s just two days before my mother and father were due to travel up to Manchester. In other words,” Lockwood went on, “it’s two days before their car was hit in a freak accident and they were killed in a ball of flame. Two days before they, this lecture, and their inconvenient theories were lost to the world forever.” He tossed the pamphlet on the floor.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” I said.

  “They were murdered, Lucy. Yes.”

  “And you think that Marissa and the Orpheus Society—”

  He held my gaze. “I don’t think that, Lucy. I know.”

  Whatever the drawbacks of Flo Bones’s nursing techniques—and judging by the state of Lockwood’s bedroom when we next looked in, these included a total lack of interest in cleanliness, air quality, and the orderly disposal of bloodied bandages—it could not be denied that they produced results. George was sitting up in bed that morning, wedged among pillows and living room cushions, with Lockwood’s best bathrobe draped over his shoulders and a tray of cakes lying at an angle on his lap. His face was horribly discolored, with the bluish-purple flush of a soft plum, and there was a white compress taped over his left eye. Somehow he had contrived to balance his broken spectacles on his swollen nose. He looked like an elderly owl that had recently fallen out with a woodpecker. But his one good eye was open and sparkling with intelligence, and that was enough to have me grinning like an idiot as I sat on the bed beside him.

  “Look at you!” I said. “You’re alive and awake, and sitting up and everything!”

  “Not so loud.” George’s voice was stronger, but as raspy as a piece of sandpaper scouring an ashtray. “You’ll wake poor Flo. She’s wiped out.” He nodded over to the corner of the room where a still shape in a puffer jacket lay curled up in the center of a nest of tumbled clothes. Flo’s knees were drawn up, her head rested on her hands. She had removed her hat, and her matted straw-blond hair radiated around her like a deformed starfish. Her eyes were closed. She was breathing long and deeply.

  Lockwood blinked. “Wait! Are those my sweaters? And my best shirts tucked under her muddy boots? You’ve emptied out the contents of my drawers!”

  “She needed something cozy to lie down on,” George said. “You wouldn’t deny her that, surely.”

  “There are two spare bedspreads in the linen closet!”

  “Oh, yeah. Didn’t think of them. Anyway, keep it down. She’s been nursing me all night. In all honesty, I feel quite caked out….” With painful movements, George set his tray aside. His good eye inspected our cuts and bruises. “What’s all this, then? You trying to steal my thunder here?”

  “We’ve been out,” Lockwood said, “getting something for you.” He placed the copy of Occult Theories on the bedspread. “Hope it’s worth it.”

  The lower half of George’s purpled face parted in a crooked grin. “Christmas has come early! Thank you….” He patted the pamphlet weakly. “Which was it, Fittes or Orpheus?”

  “Orpheus,” Lockwood said. “Speaking of which, if you’re no longer almost dying, you might want to start reading pronto. We may not have much time.”

  Our raid on the Orpheus Society was a turning point. We knew this without discussing it. First the attack on George, and now our retaliatory expedition—lines had been crossed by both sides, and there was no possibility of returning to the watchful truce of a few days previously. Consequences were inevitable; the question was in what form they would come. Personally, I expected a rapid payback. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Marissa Fittes and a crack DEPRAC team had shown up before lunchtime to lead us away in chains.

  But nothing like that happened. The day was quiet—or at least it would have been, if Lockwood hadn’t taken the opportunity to leap into action.

  Despite his lack of sleep, the events of the night had galvanized him; he radiated a strange, mercurial energy that would not let him rest—and all of us were caught up in its wake. Sooner or later, our enemies would respond: in the meantime, we had to make preparations, and to that end Lockwood steered our efforts. He was everywhere, his eyes bright, his voice calm and measured, issuing orders and making plans. Kipps, who had crashed overnight on our library floor (having rejected our offer of George’s room), was sent into central London with a shopping list as long as his arm, Holly was dispatched to Mullet’s, and Flo Bones, once she had finally awoken, was likewise pried from George’s bedside and given a job to do.

  “I need your ear out there, Flo,” Lockwood said, “I need to hear what’s being talked about among the relic-men. Any rumors, anything strange that’s been heard or seen, particularly if it involves Sir Ru
pert Gale or any of the Fittes gang. News travels fast in the criminal underworld, and you’ve got the best antennae of anyone I know.”

  From the expression on her face, I expected a trademark Flo diatribe at this point, but she just went quiet, nodded, and slipped away into the garden. When Lockwood really wanted something, it was very hard for anyone to say no.

  After that, Lockwood himself departed, leaving me to keep an eye on George. He wouldn’t say where he was going, and I watched him stride off down Portland Row with a queasy sensation in my stomach. Since making the shocking discovery about his parents, Lockwood had seemed curiously upbeat, even elated at the turn of events. It was the same brittle defiance that I’d seen in the cemetery, only now sharpened with new purpose. Our enemies were in plain sight, and the deaths of his parents weren’t quite as meaningless as he’d believed. I understood why that might please him. Still, given the forces now ranged against us, and the unlikeliness of getting help from Barnes, DEPRAC, or anyone else, I could only be fearful of where it would end.

  I peeped into his bedroom. George had dropped off to sleep again. He hadn’t yet read the book. I opened the window to fumigate the place, and brought in fresh lavender. Even so, Flo’s presence lingered. I went away and left him.

  For much of the morning, 35 Portland Row was quiet. Toward lunchtime the house shook with the approach of a large delivery van, inching its way along the street. Quill Kipps sat beside the driver. They had come from a builder’s supply yard; under Kipps’s direction, men began unloading sections of particleboard, tools, ropes, and other materials, and dumped them in the hall. Before they could pull away, a Mullet’s van showed up, with Holly in the cab. It brought fresh quantities of iron, salt, and magnesium flares, and there was a great kerfuffle in the street as the vehicles struggled to pass each other.