The Empty Grave

by Jonathan Stroud

  “I don’t like to say it,” a voice said behind us, “but you all really need to spruce yourselves up a bit.”

  Flo Bones had materialized by our table. She looked precisely the same as she always did, down to the familiar stains on her puffer jacket and her mud-encrusted boots. Her straw hat was perched on her head at a jaunty angle, and she was spooning something hot and flavorsome from a Styrofoam dish into her mouth.

  “Look at the state of you!” she said, shaking her head. “Soon I won’t like to be seen in your company. Some of us have standards, you know.”

  “Flo!” Lockwood half rose from his chair and gave her a fleeting hug. “You look in excellent shape. I’m glad.”

  “Yeah, I’m just dandy. Enjoying a bit of pie and mash here, too.”

  George gave a start. “Pie and mash? Where’d you get that from?”

  “Next door. You’re in the wrong café. They do sticky toffee pudding there, and all.”

  George groaned into his mug of tea. “The best they’ve got here is fish-paste sandwiches! And it’s too late to switch. All my muscles have seized up.”

  Lockwood grinned. “You were amazing last night, Flo,” he said. “Barnes told me you were instrumental in getting him here. How did you persuade him to bring a team along to Fittes House?”

  Flo’s blue eyes stared off across the Strand. “It weren’t easy—he’s a stubborn old goat. Well, first off, yesterday, I took him down to your place in Portland Row. I showed him the state of it—you vanished, all hell broken loose, a spirit gate upstairs, and a couple of Winkman’s men still systematically rifling through your stuff. That shook him. What the Winkman boys confessed to, when he got them back to Scotland Yard…well, that shook him even more. So he put a team together to have a quiet word with Rupert Gale. But he didn’t exactly hurry, and by the time we got here, you was already in the middle of your little private war. After that, Barnes couldn’t tiptoe about no more. He had to get involved.” She made a scraping noise with her spoon. “Yep. That’s the story. Nothing more to say.”

  “Hold on—Barnes also says you helped capture one of Gale’s thugs, who tried to escape,” Holly said eagerly. “Says he pulled a sword on you, but you disarmed him with six swipes of your slime-flange! That sounds incredible, Flo! I so wish I’d seen it!”

  “I’m not sure I remember that bit.” Flo retrieved the final trace of pie and mash with a finger, and tossed the dish onto the table. She glanced over at the café door, where Inspector Barnes had appeared. He was loudly giving orders to an officer behind him. “Looks like it’s maybe time to go,” she said. “DEPRAC officers and me don’t normally see eye to eye. Special circumstances only. I’ll see you later, maybe. Meantime—try to clean yourselves up!”

  George pulled back the silver hood and adjusted his glasses. “Flo—when everything’s settled down, couple of days or so, I was wondering if—”

  She grinned at him, showing her bright white teeth. “Yeah, come and find me. I’ll be under a bridge somewhere.”

  “I’ll bring licorice,” George said. But Flo had faded back into the crowd.

  Barking a series of gruff apologies, Inspector Barnes pushed his way past the food lines to our table. He had one arm in a sling protruding from beneath his leather jacket.

  “Hello, Mr. Barnes.” Lockwood put on a fair attempt at his most gleaming smile. “Nice jacket,” he added. “It really suits you.”

  The inspector regarded himself. “You know, I think it does. I just might keep it. So, you’re being fed and watered, then. Anything else you need?”

  “Pie and mash would go down nicely,” George said. “Also some sticky toffee pudding…if you’re offering.”

  “I’m not. And they’re all out of that next door, too. One of my men just asked. What I really came to tell you is that we’re almost done with the search-and-rescue operation over the road. I’ll be wanting you to escort me down into the basement soon, show me what’s what.”

  “Excuse me, Inspector,” I said, “but is there any word on Kipps?”

  Barnes rubbed at his mustache. “I believe he’s been in surgery. The doctors are cautiously optimistic.” He held up a hand as we all tried to speak. “And no, you can’t visit him. You’d only cause disaster somehow. Cubbins would trip and impale him on his sword, or Lockwood here would grin him half to death. Just let him be. I need you all here, anyway.” He frowned. “I want to see the basement before I begin my interrogation of those lab coats we found skulking down below.”

  “Most of the Fittes crowd will have had nothing to do with it,” Lockwood said. “It’s just a very small group of them—an inner core—who worked on the secret projects. But the same isn’t true of the members of the Orpheus Society, and they’re powerful people. What are you going to do about them?”

  “I don’t know yet!” The inspector glared at us. “I don’t know! There are big decisions to be made, and much to be done.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “The one good thing is that all those relics from the pillars have been destroyed. And I’m going to go one better. DEPRAC will ensure that any psychic object found inside that cursed building is immediately destroyed.”

  “Good idea, Mr. Barnes,” I said. I glanced down under the table, at the roundish bundle of burned cloth resting between my feet.

  “There’s one more thing you might want to prioritize, Inspector,” Lockwood said. He lowered his voice. “We talked about it earlier. Penelope’s and Marissa’s bodies…”

  Barnes winced, and glanced anxiously across at the other café customers. “Not so loud! We don’t want everyone overhearing this….” He drew close, and spoke in an undertone. “What about them?”

  “You’ll want to dispose of…those objects pretty quickly,” Lockwood went on. “Might I suggest they’re taken to the Fittes mausoleum up the road? That’s where Marissa ought to be, after all.”

  “There’s someone down there who’ll be very pleased to see her,” Holly said. She took a fastidious sip of tea.

  Barnes straightened; he had noticed one of his men signaling at the door. “We’ll see what we can do. Well, I’ll leave you for the present. There are legions of reporters clamoring for a statement. In the meantime, rest up, don’t leave, and don’t talk to anybody here.”

  “At least the truth about the Problem will come out now,” Lockwood said. He had been looking toward the square, where the crowds were continuing to grow.

  Barnes patted him on the shoulder. “Ah, yes,” he said. “About all that. You and I clearly need to have a little chat.”

  Our work at Fittes House lasted until after lunchtime; after that, further consultations at Scotland Yard took up the entire afternoon. The DEPRAC cars didn’t drop us back at the end of Portland Row until after five. You could feel the onset of evening in the air, but the sky was still blue, and the rusted ghost-lamps were not yet buzzing into life. The momentous events in central London had yet to resonate here. Many of the houses still had their doors and windows open, and children were playing on the sidewalks and in their yards. The purple-blue splendor of the lavender bushes pressing against the railings almost gave the street the air of a formal garden. At gates and porches, beneath twinkling silvery defenses, neighbors discussed the events of the day. Old Arif, standing outside his general store, was tipping last night’s lavender ash out of his street brazier, before readying another fire. His humming, the laughter of the children, and the voices of the adults merged and mingled on the ear.

  We headed slowly, painfully, up the road.

  The front of 35 Portland Row didn’t look too bad. Aside from the magnesium stains on the path, the brightly colored DEPRAC tape wound messily across the gate, and the CONTAMINATED ZONE warning signs plastered on the old black door, you might almost have thought nothing had happened there.

  Lockwood pulled the tape off the gate, crumpled it into a sticky ball, and cast it aside. He put his hand on the latch but didn’t push it open.

  We stood outside in the street looking u
p at the house.

  Only one of the windows was obviously broken, but we could see the remains of boarding over the insides, and they all looked dark and hollow. There was salt and iron crusted on the path, too, presumably left by Barnes’s team.

  How many times in our careers had we stood like this outside a building rendered terrible by a haunting, where some violent incident or trauma had scarred it psychically down the years? How many times had we picked up our equipment bags and strolled purposefully in? We never delayed. Dawdling on the threshold wasn’t our thing.

  All through the aftermath in the Strand and Scotland Yard, we had maintained our composure and our energies. Now, suddenly, a great weariness descended on us. We stood frozen at the threshold of our own ravaged house.

  It was Holly who drew herself up and pushed open the gate. “Come on,” she said briskly, “let’s get it over with.”

  THE ULTIMATE BETRAYAL

  OCCULT EXPERIMENTS IN HEART OF LONDON

  PENELOPE FITTES INVOLVEMENT GOES BACK YEARS

  INSIDE TODAY: M. U. BARNES AND A. J. LOCKWOOD

  FINALLY SPEAK OUT

  Extraordinary developments continued yesterday in the Fittes House Scandal, a full week after explosions rocked central London, killing company head Penelope Fittes and many others, and leading to revelations that have turned the psychic defense industry upside down. With Fittes House itself still under quarantine, and many employees remaining under arrest, DEPRAC officials have been slow to provide details of either the hidden laboratories discovered beneath the building or of the secret raid that brought them to light. Now, in an exclusive interview with today’s Times of London, two key players in the raid, Mr. Montagu Barnes of DEPRAC and Mr. Anthony Lockwood of the celebrated Lockwood & Co. agency, come forward to set the record straight.

  “In the basement levels of Fittes House,” Mr. Lockwood says, “we discovered evidence of unnatural occult experiments using forbidden psychic relics. Stockpiles of illegal explosives were also found, some of which were set off in the fighting that followed our arrival. We were attacked by fearsome ghosts—and by dangerous criminals, of whom Penelope Fittes was one.”

  After a hurried funeral service yesterday, Ms. Fittes’s body was interred in the crypt beneath the Fittes mausoleum. Meanwhile, several of her associates at the Sunrise Corporation and other major companies have been arrested. DEPRAC emphasizes, however, that the public need not fear a breakdown in our national paranormal defenses. The Fittes and Rotwell agencies are being reconstituted as the United Psychic Response Agency, under the temporary control of Mr. Barnes. “Rest assured,” he says, “that this scandal, shocking though it is, will not deter psychic investigation agencies, big and small, from continuing to serve you in our ongoing battle with the Problem.”

  According to Mr. Lockwood, the scale of the occult activity at Fittes House was enough to threaten everyone in London. “I know that DEPRAC is investigating the nature of these wicked experiments,” he says. “There’s no question, however, that Penelope Fittes was orchestrating them, and had been for many years. It’s a grievous betrayal of everything her grandmother stood for. Marissa Fittes will be turning in her grave.”

  Full Barnes and Lockwood Interviews: see pages 3–6

  “Decline and Fall”—the Story of the Fittes Dynasty: see pages 7–11

  Anthony Lockwood: “My Style”: see fashion pullout, center pages

  “What amazes me, Lockwood,” I said, looking at him over the top of the newspaper, “is how much you manage to say in this interview, and how little. You and Barnes are as bad as each other now. I’m surprised you’re not growing a little bottle-brush mustache.”

  Lockwood grinned at me from over his paint pot. He was standing by the window of our new spare bedroom, applying a top coat to the wall. A patch of sunlight bathed him, and since the paint was white, and he wore a new white shirt, and it was a particularly sunny morning, the effect was enough to make you shield your eyes. “I know what you mean, Luce,” he said. “But you’re being harsh. Most of it’s accurate enough, in its way.”

  I folded the newspaper neatly (George would want it for our casebook) and went back to my own painting. “Oh, it’s all kind of right,” I said, “and yet somehow the truth manages to wriggle out of view. Penelope was bad! Technically true. But no mention of Marissa and how her wicked spirit ran the show. Unnatural experiments! True again. But nothing about the spirit gate in the basement, or journeys to the Other Side.”

  “That’s the deal we made, Lucy,” Lockwood said. “Barnes was very persuasive. We know the reasons why. Hey, I think this last wall is almost done. How are you getting on outside, George?”

  His voice echoed hollowly across the blank, bare walls of the spare room. The brand-new door swung open, and George looked in. His bruises were beginning to fade, but he still bore the marks of his beating, and—like all of us who had spent time beyond the spirit gate—he moved more slowly than usual. He wore the new pair of glasses he had bought that week, slightly smaller and less round than his previous pair. Even I had to admit they were almost stylish. Right now, however, their urbane effect was blunted by his enormous paint-spattered set of jeans. These were of remarkable and sinister bagginess, revealing untold acreages of George whenever he bent over or made sharp turns. He too held a brush; he was in the middle of under-coating the doorframe on the landing.

  “I’m progressing well,” he said, “though I could do with some breakfast. Oh, this is looking great in here. Very fresh, very modern, and not a single hellish portal to the land of the dead in sight. Now that’s what I call a guest bedroom.”

  It was certainly a marked improvement on what had come before. Jessica’s bedroom had been transformed. The day after the fateful events at Fittes House, Inspector Barnes had sent a DEPRAC clearance team to Portland Row. With some difficulty, they had dismantled the spirit gate and removed the Sources. They had also proposed to take out the ancient bed. After only a moment’s hesitation, Lockwood had agreed. He had already noticed that the death-glow hanging over it was gone. The room was peaceful now, stripped bare of psychic tragedy. Jessica’s presence no longer hung quite so heavily over either the house or Lockwood’s heart. It was time to begin anew.

  “I still think we maybe ought to do something about this stain,” George said, pointing to the massive circular ectoplasm burn in the center of the floor. “All the eggshell white in the world won’t distract people from something that size. Look, you can even see the marks of the chains.”

  “Got a nice cream carpet coming tomorrow,” I said. “It’ll all be gone. And a set of bedroom furniture on Friday. The room will be brand-new, and ready to be used again.”

  “Think Holly will want to move in?” George said. We could hear her calling us from the kitchen. “You asked her, Lockwood, I know.”

  Lockwood left his brush balanced on the paint can; we made for the door. “I don’t think she will, actually. She says she likes having a separate place. Did you know she’s got a roommate? A girl who works at DEPRAC. That was news to me.”

  We went downstairs slowly, feet clattering on the wooden steps. The carpet was gone here, too, and the walls were naked, stripped of ornament, marked with bullet holes and spear marks, blackened with magnesium burns. We would have to repaper them, start afresh. It was a big job, but that was okay. The windows were open, and there was a smell of toast and bacon floating upward through the house. It would all be done in time.

  In the kitchen the toaster had just pinged, and eggs were frying in the pan. Holly was gathering cereal boxes from one of the new cupboards. It currently lacked a door, and she was simply reaching in and passing them back to Quill Kipps, who sat waiting at the kitchen table. His movements were slow and awkward—the stitches in his side prevented him from using his left arm—and he looked as thin and pale as a reheated corpse, but that last bit was nothing new. Basically he was in good shape. He was the only one of us who didn’t have new white flecks in his hair, courtesy of th
e Other Side. Right now he was frowning at our crisp new Thinking Cloth, which winked out at us behind the spread of breakfast things.

  “Holly says I have to christen the new cloth,” he said. “Write or draw something on it. Seems a weird ritual.”

  “Got to do it if you want to join us for breakfast,” I said. “That’s a rule.”

  “Just do a rude cartoon,” George said. “That always works for me, I find.”

  Lockwood nodded. “Yes, and it always ruins my appetite.”

  “Speaking of which—” Holly went over to the toaster. “Lucy, could you please move that horrid, disgusting skull away from the center of the table? I don’t want to touch it. We’re eating now.”

  “Sorry, Hol.”

  “I don’t know why you insist on having it with us for each meal. It’s a lovely sunny day, and it’s not going to rematerialize here.”

  “I suppose it isn’t. But you never know. Where are you going to perch, George?”

  “Here, next to Quill.”

  Kipps eyed George’s jeans cautiously. “Just try not to bend over too much when you sit down.”

  I took the laden toast plate from Holly, and went to my chair. Lockwood had already taken his position at the head of the table. He began pouring us all tea.

  “Let’s see,” George said, settling himself with satisfaction. “Tea, toast, eggs, jam, and chocolate spread, various sugary cereals…Looks like a traditional Lockwood and Co. breakfast. Wait! What’s that?”