The Empty Grave

by Jonathan Stroud

  “Good.”

  “Was it your side?” Holly asked. “You want me to look at it?”

  Kipps gestured at his voluminous robes. “Under all this nonsense? I don’t think you’d ever find it.” He shook his head. “Thanks, Holly. It’s a scratch. No big deal.”

  “It’s best to keep ourselves well wrapped up anyway,” Lockwood said. “Feel how cold it is? The power of the capes is strong, but it doesn’t extend far, and if you take them off, you’re done for.”

  “So,” I said. I glanced over at the opening to the black landing, the wreaths of mist hanging over the stairs. “What now? How long do you think we have to wait here?”

  “Not long, I hope,” Holly said.

  “I don’t know….” Lockwood frowned in the shadows of his hood. “Sir Rupert showing up has put a wrench in the works. He knows Marissa well; if he knows what a spirit gate is too, he’ll understand what we’ve done, and he’ll take steps to stymie us. He may well hang around. Mind you, if I were him, I’d—” He broke off. “No, I’d better not say.”

  “You’d do what?” George asked.

  There was a brief, dull thud behind us from the far side of the circle. The ghosts trapped within it whirled soundlessly in consternation.

  Lockwood stared at us. He bit his lip. He walked slowly back around to the far side of the spirit gate. The rest of us trailed after him. We all saw the iron guide-chain hanging limply from the metal post. It no longer cut straight through the circle at chest height, but meandered uselessly on the floor.

  “I’d cut the chain,” Lockwood said. “Cut it so we can’t get back through.”

  We gazed at the broken chain and then at him.

  “What, so we’re stuck here now?” Kipps demanded. “Stuck on the Other Side? When was this part of your master plan?”

  Lockwood shook his head. “Don’t raise your voice like that. Don’t get angry. They sense emotion. We don’t know what might be listening.”

  “Oh, something might be listening to us now?” Kipps gave a quiet whoop of rage. “Great! That makes it even better! You said we’d be safe here! You said we’d be okay! Now we’re trapped in the land of the dead, with hordes of ravenous ghosts just waiting to swoop down on us, and we’re wearing stupid costumes to boot! Congratulations! It’s a terrific plan, Lockwood, one of your very best! You said—”

  “I know what I said. I’m sorry. I didn’t know they’d cut the chain.”

  “You might have thought about that possibility before bringing us here to die!”

  Lockwood cursed. “Well, if anyone else ever did a bit of thinking besides me—”

  “Shut up,” I said. “Shut up, both of you. This is no time to argue. We need to stick together and think clearly. There must be something we can do.”

  We stood in silence in the little bedroom. As I remembered from buildings I’d seen on my last visit to the Other Side, this place had approximately the same geometry as the bedroom in our home, but it was subtly skewed. The walls looked soft, as if they were about to melt. Seams of ice glistened in cracks in the floor and shone on the surface of our cloaks. The strange flat brightness lit our hunched forms and stricken faces with its cold, indifferent glare.

  No one said anything for a time, then Holly stirred. “We do have another option,” she said. “How feasible it is, I don’t know.”

  “It’s got to be better than Lockwood’s last appalling plan,” Kipps said.

  Holly smiled faintly. “I don’t know about that. Anyway, here it is. We can’t get back through this gate, correct? So there’s no point staying here. The only other chance we have is to locate another gate, and go back through that. Well, we do know that there’s another such gate in London, and we’re pretty sure where it is.”

  She looked around at us, her face as calm and unflustered as if she were giving us our weekly schedule of cases, back in the other 35 Portland Row. Lockwood whistled slowly. George let out a noise like a pricked balloon.

  “Fittes House…” I said. “We have to go there.”

  Kipps groaned. “I take back what I said. Your plan is as bad as Lockwood’s. Worse even.”

  But a small smile was broadening on Lockwood’s face. “Holly,” he said, “you’re a genius….You’re right. That’s it. That’s what we have to do.” His voice crackled with excitement. “Don’t you see? The layout on the Other Side is pretty much the same as the world we know. So we simply stroll out through that door there. We go downstairs and leave the house and exit into the other Portland Row. It’ll be there, of course, a dark version of the one we live in. Then we set off across London—the other London, I should say. We go to Fittes House. We locate the gate that must be there. Then we step through it, back into the real world!” He chuckled. “And this is the real beauty of it: by doing that, we can catch dear Marissa entirely unawares. We bypass all her defenses, and catch her red-handed! We can get the proof we need to end all this. In so doing, we’ll have turned desperate defense into triumphant surprise attack.” Lockwood’s eyes gleamed in the depths of his hood. “It’s a brilliant strategy, Holly. Well done.”

  She nodded. “Thanks, though personally all I really want to do is just get out alive.”

  Kipps rubbed the back of his neck. “Hold it. From what you and Lucy saw last time, this ‘other London’ isn’t going to be uninhabited.” He swallowed. “It’s not some crummy village, with a few dead yokels to worry about. It’s going to be packed….And what about George? How’s he going to cope with this? And how long will our cloaks—”

  “I’ll be all right,” George said abruptly. “I’ll have to be. What alternative is there?”

  “Lucy? What do you think?”

  I was thinking a lot of things, but mostly I was trying to suppress the panic I felt at being trapped on the Other Side. It was the kind of panic that threatened to make you stupid, freeze you rigid where you stood. It was informed by memories of the terrors I’d experienced on my last visit, and also by a horrid sense that the room we were in was getting smaller. I felt suddenly convinced that if we didn’t start moving, I would never find my way to the open air.

  “I think Holly’s right,” I said. “We’ve got to try to find the other gate. Marissa would be a bonus, of course. But right now…please, we’ve got to go.”

  Like the bedroom, the landing was an echo of ours in the living world. All its warm, soft details and imperfections had been stripped away. It was blank, empty, glimmering with ice. The walls were bare, its decorations gone; the floor had cracks running through it—thin, curved cracks like veins. Mist filled the stairwell. Silence pummeled our ears.

  There was no carpet on the steps; the treads were wooden. Our boots tapped hollowly as we slowly filed downstairs.

  We neared the bottom. All at once the mists swirled, and a faint dark shape rushed past us along the hall. It was large, hulking—the figure of a burly man. In utter silence, it moved from the direction of the kitchen toward the front of the house. For a moment it was silhouetted at the threshold, then it sped onward out of view.

  Lockwood, who was in the lead, had stopped in shock at the sight. He looked back at me, eyes wide beneath his hood. “Who was that?” he whispered.

  I had no answer. Lockwood sped up; we came down into the entrance hall and hurried along it to where the front door gaped open under the blank black sky.

  A thin mist hung over Portland Row and the street was white with frost. The dull, hard half-light shone over everything. There were no ghost-lamps on; the lamps themselves had disappeared, and the iron gates and railings that ran beside the sidewalks were gone, too. The houses were gray slabs.

  The hulking figure was just visible, racing away down the center of the street. It did not look back. The mists swallowed it; stillness returned.

  “Who was that?” Lockwood said again. “Who else is in our house?”

  A thought occurred to me. I knew someone who was. I looked back into the darkness of the hall.

  “Wait for me her
e,” I said.

  I turned and walked back into the house. The wall beneath the staircase was riven with cracks, some so big you could stick a finger into them. The kitchen door was partly frozen, ice melding it to the floor, and I pushed my way in with difficulty. The room inside was very dark, but I could see that there was no table there, and none of our cupboards or cabinets. Out of the corner of my eye, I could sense their outlines, but they vanished if you looked at them.

  As I had expected, a thin and rangy youth with spiky hair stood at the side of the room. It was the precise location where I’d left the ghost-jar. The skull’s spirit was gray and faint, but fully formed—a scrawny-looking boy, a little older than me. He had a rather gaunt face with very large, dark eyes that were watching me impassively.

  “Ah,” the youth said, “I wondered if you’d think of me. You got through the gate, then.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We got through.”

  “How nice for you.”

  Both his shape and his voice were faint, perhaps the fault of the silver-glass jar that imprisoned him on the living side. It was the first time I’d ever really looked at him, at the spirit that he truly was. He wore a white shirt and gray trousers that were slightly too short for his bony legs. His feet were bare. He’d still been young when he died.

  “They’ve closed the gate behind us,” I said.

  One of the youth’s eyebrows lifted in sardonic amusement. “Have they? What a shame. How does it feel to be trapped somewhere unpleasant? Bet you wish someone could set you free.”

  I looked down at my belt, where the hammer I’d been using to break the Sources still hung. I said, “We’re going to try to get across London. Find Marissa’s gate. I just came to tell you.”

  “How very kind of you.” The youth’s lip curled. “So, walking across Dark London, eh? Good luck with that. Mind you, even if they hadn’t shut your gate, it would be best to avoid this house for a while.”

  “Why, what’s happening?”

  “In simple terms, they’re trashing the place. Sir Rupert Gale is using some very salty language. Even I’ve learned a few new words. He’s got his work cut out trying to keep control, though—most of Winkman’s men don’t have a clue about what you just did, and they’re freaked out. There’s talk of witchcraft and devils.” The youth rolled his eyes, and for an instant he looked like the face in the jar. “Honestly, the average medieval serf would have more wit than them. Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know that most of that crowd are injured, too—stabbed, bashed, and otherwise blown up by all your flares. They haven’t got an eyebrow among them.”

  “Good,” I said grimly.

  “Oh, and Winkman just died.”

  “What?” I sucked in the ice cold air. “What? How?”

  “As far as I can make out, you walloped him with a floorboard. When he fell back, he collided with one of his lackeys’ knives. Well, if you go running around carrying sharp objects, what can you expect?” The youth gave a callous grin, and again I recognized the ghost I knew so well. “They brought him up to the kitchen, but he passed across just now. I’m surprised you didn’t bump into him.”

  I thought of the bulky, stumbling shape fleeing down the hallway and off into the dark. I raised my glove to my face. There was a coating of ice on the palm; I lowered it again hurriedly. When I moved my feet, I had to break little bonds of ice that fixed my boots to the floor. Panic enveloped me again. I felt that the walls were warping in, closing off my exit. “I’ve got to go,” I said. “But I’ll come back. When we all get home—”

  “I won’t be here,” the youth said. The dark eyes regarded me. “They’ve just opened the cupboard and found me. Gale’s taking me away now. Good-bye.”

  “What? Where to?” I felt a sudden stab of pain. “No, no, they can’t do that….”

  The gray face flickered and broke apart, as if the connection was being disrupted. “Of course they can. It’s your fault, Lucy. I asked you to let me go, and now it’s too late.”

  A great misery rose up in me, a welling loneliness that caught me by surprise. “Skull, I’m so sorry…I would have done it….”

  The shape faded; for a moment, the voice lingered. “Too late for both of us. I’m trapped, and you’re dead….”

  I stared at the blank space where the youth had been. “But…I’m not dead….”

  “You might as well be, Lucy. You’re on the Other Side….”

  Stumbling back up the hallway, I had to twist my body past big extrusions of ice that had pushed through the cracks in the wall. But the front door was open, and the others were waiting for me under the black sky. Ice was shimmering on their cloaks. It was utterly silent, except for the rasp of my breathing and the crunch of my boots on the path. In subdued tones I told them about my conversation with the skull, and his news of Winkman.

  “Well,” Lockwood said, “I’ve got to say his death isn’t going to weigh too heavily on my conscience.” He looked off down the road.

  “It’s good news that he’s not hanging around your basement like some victims of violent deaths do,” Kipps said. “Otherwise you’d find his ghost glaring over your shoulder every time you went downstairs to wash your undies. You’d be on an endless repeat cycle.”

  “But where do you think he was going?” Holly said.

  No one answered. We gazed into the still and silent mists.

  “Well, we haven’t got time to stand around wondering,” I said in a decisive voice. “We have somewhere we need to get to. Who knows the quickest way to the Strand?”

  Our journey across that dark and frozen London had the remorseless, terrible logic of a dream from which it was impossible to wake. It began in mists and silence and ended in a rush of terror, but wrongness and dread hung over it at every step. We walked in places where living feet should never tread; we witnessed things that living eyes should never see. And in so doing, all normal rules were turned upside down. For they were not our streets to walk in. It was not our London. We trespassed in the city of the dead, and all our skills and Talents counted for nothing.

  The first road we walked down was Portland Row. But it wasn’t Portland Row, not with that ferocious, never-ending silence, and the frost on the road, and the roofs and chimney pots merging with that dull black starless sky. The houses were familiar—but the dead light that shone over everything and came from nowhere (there was no moon) rendered them flat and lifeless, as if drawn on giant slabs of cardboard.

  There was something false about those buildings. You felt that if you knocked on them with your fist, whole walls would tumble down. The doors were either absent or ajar. They were gaping holes torn in the fabric of the street. None of the windows had curtains; they were stark and blank and staring. It made you believe things were watching you from inside the empty rooms.

  But to begin with, we saw nobody at all.

  We walked down the center of the road. A faint set of marks stretched ahead of us in the frost—the wandering footprints of a solitary man. We followed them as far as the empty shell of Arif’s store, where the wide shopwindows hung blank and open, with mist swirling deep inside the carcass of the building. Here the footprints veered away along a side street and were lost to sight. We did not follow them. If it had been Winkman we’d seen, he had taken his own way.

  “We should go left here,” George whispered. Blooms of ice crusted the lenses of his glasses. His voice didn’t carry well in the thin air. “That’s the shortest route.”

  “Good.” Like mine, Lockwood’s face was pinched with cold. “We need to be as quick as we can. The capes are strong, but I don’t know how long they’ll last.”

  We walked on. The air was bitter—a dry, dead absence that sucked the life from your lungs and the motion from your blood. It clung to the surface of our cloaks, coating them with ice that creaked and cracked gently as we moved. But it could not penetrate. We existed in fragile bubbles of warmth that sustained us as we hurried on. Even so, the silence bore into our skulls, and the co
untless watchful windows on every side filled us with a slowly mounting fear.

  There were no ghost-lamps in that city. No railings, no cars—nothing of iron—and no running water. The drains and gutters were empty, the runnels dry. Street nameplates were gone, and the signs above the storefronts carried no legible words. The route we took was familiar to us, but the overarching stillness made it alien. During my previous visit to the Other Side, I’d been in the open countryside. Here, in central London, the utter silence had even more of a transformative effect. It turned the rows of houses into cliff faces, the streets into a dark labyrinth of canyons and ravines.

  Passing the mouth of one such canyon, we saw a figure walking along it in the distance. It had a broad-brimmed hat and was limping very slowly in our direction. We hurried onward, clambering over a pile of rubble from a partially collapsed building that spread out across the street. There was a junction just beyond, and here Lockwood led us abruptly down an alley, away from the main road.

  “What are you doing?” Kipps hissed. The ice on the tips of his feathers made them bend like mad antennae above his face. “This isn’t the quickest way.”

  “I didn’t like the look of that thing in the side road,” Lockwood said. “Also, there were more of them in the mist up ahead—didn’t you see? Two grown-ups and a little child. We’ve got to avoid contact at all costs. We can double back farther on.”

  But this was easier said than done. For every street that was empty, there was another with something wandering in the mists. Dark shapes stood at the upstairs windows of hollow houses, staring up toward the sky. Tiny figures sat in frozen sandboxes at the edge of city parks. Lines of adults waited on sidewalks, perhaps queuing for buses that would never come. Men in suits and ties meandered past each other; women walked with hands out, pushing nonexistent strollers. All were silent, gray, and drifting—the colors of their clothes faded, their faces bleached as white as bone. Lost souls, the skull had called them, and I knew that it was right. They were lost, mindlessly repeating actions that no longer had a meaning.