Lockwood & Co. Book Three: The Hollow Boy

by Jonathan Stroud

  I grabbed at Lockwood’s arm. “They’ll surround us! Downstairs! Quick!”

  He shook his head. “No, there’s nothing down there! And if they follow us, we’re trapped. We’ve got to find the cause of all this. We’ve got to keep going up.”

  “But we’re at the top of the house!”

  “Are we? What about that?”

  He pointed. I looked, saw a narrow wooden attic hatch, high up in the ceiling.

  “George,” Lockwood said calmly. “Pass me the ladder, please.”

  “What ladder?” George was busy throwing a salt-bomb; it ricocheted off the wall, peppering the Shades with particles of bright-green fire.

  “Pass me the ladder, George.”

  George waved his hands above his head in panic. “Where from? Down my trousers?”

  “There’s one in that closet you opened, you twit! Quick!”

  “Oh, yes. I remember.” George leaped for the little door.

  Ghosts pressed in on us. Their whispering had become a roaring. At my side I saw the outline of a man in a vest and jogging pants. He shimmered toward me; I slashed the rapier diagonally, slicing him in two. The two halves tumbled, flowed together, re-formed. Beyond, Lockwood had brought lengths of chain from his bag; he was dragging them into a rough circle in the middle of the landing.

  In a moment, George was back; he had the ladder, the kind that expanded on telescopic legs. He jumped into the center of the circle, next to Lockwood and me. Without words, he extended the ladder up toward the ceiling, balancing its end against the rim of the attic opening, just below the hatch.

  All around us, the landing had filled with eerie light. Figures flowed toward us, white arms reaching. Ectoplasm fizzed against the barrier of chains.

  Up the ladder we went, first Lockwood, then George, then me. Lockwood reached the hatch. He shoved it hard. A band of blackness opened, expanding slowly like the edges of a paper fan. A smattering of dust fell down.

  Was it me, or had the assembled ghosts below us suddenly grown quiet? Their whispering stilled. They watched us with blank eyes.

  Lockwood pushed again. With a single crash, the hatch fell back on its hinge. Now there was a hole, a black slot gaping like a mouth. Chill air poured down from it.

  This was where it stemmed from, the horror of the house. This was where we’d find the cause. We didn’t hesitate. We scrambled up and, one after the other, were swallowed by the dark.

  It was cold, that was the first thing.

  It was also pitch-black. A hazy column of other-light drifted up through the attic hatch from the ghosts below and lit our three pale faces; otherwise we could see nothing.

  And there was something with us, close and all around. We felt the pressure of its presence, hovering over us in the dark. The force of it made it hard to breathe, hard to move; it was like we were suddenly crouching in deep water, with the awful weight of it crushing down….

  Lockwood was the first to fight back. I heard rustling as he reached into his bag and drew out his lantern. He flicked the switch and turned the dial; a soft warm radiance swelled from it and showed us where we were.

  An attic: a cavernous space, broad at its base, and rising into darkness beneath the eaves of a steeply pitched roof. There were old brick gables at either end, one with chimneys built in, and one pierced by a single tall but narrow window. Great crossbeams spanned the shadows high above us, supporting the weight of the roof.

  A few broken tea chests lay in one corner. Otherwise the room was empty. There was nothing there.

  Or almost nothing. Cobwebs hung like hammocks between the rafters, thick and gray and heavy, like ceiling drapes in an Arabian bazaar. Where the rooflines hit the floor, they were piled in drifts, plugging the corners, softening the edges of the abandoned room. Threads of webbing dangled from the crossbeams, twitching in the little air currents our activities had stirred.

  Some of the webs glittered with frost. Our breath made bitter clouds.

  We got stiffly to our feet. There’s a well-known fact about spiders, a curious thing. They’re attracted to places of psychic disturbance; to longstanding Sources, where invisible, unknowable powers have loitered and grown strong. An unnatural congregation of spiders is a sure sign of a potent and ancient haunting, and their cobwebs are a dead giveaway. To be fair, I hadn’t seen any in the guest rooms of Lavender Lodge, but then, Mrs. Evans was probably pretty handy with her duster.

  It was a different matter in the attic, though.

  We gathered what remained of our equipment. In our haste to climb the ladder George had left his bags below, and between us we’d used up our chains and most of the salt and iron. Luckily, Lockwood still had his bag containing our vital silver Seals, and we each had our magnesium flares tucked safely in our belts. Oh, and we still had the ghost-jar too, for what it was worth. I dumped it beside the open attic hatch. The face had grown faint, the plasm dark and cold.

  “You oughtn’t to be up here….” it whispered. “Even I’m nervous, and I’m already dead.”

  I used my rapier to cut away a few dangling cobwebs near my face. “Like we’ve got a choice. You see anything, let me know.”

  Lockwood went over to the window, which was almost as tall as he was. He rubbed a circle in the filthy glass, brushing off a thin crusting of ice. “We’re overlooking the street,” he said. “I can see ghost-lamps far below. Okay. The Source must be here somewhere. We can all feel it. Go cautiously, and let’s get this done.”

  The search began. We moved like climbers laboring at altitude: it was slow, painful, painstaking. All around us the dreadful psychic weight bore down.

  There were recent handprints by the hatch, perhaps where the police had made their cursory inspection. Otherwise, no one had been in the attic for years. In places, the floor had been roughly boarded, and Lockwood pointed out the thick layers of dust lying over everything. We noticed certain swirls and curling patterns traced faintly into that dust, as if it had been stirred by curious motions of the air, but no footprints at all.

  George poked in the corners with his rapier, winding cobwebs around his blade.

  I stood in the middle, listening.

  Beyond the freezing rafters, beyond the cobwebs, the wind howled around the roof. Rain lashed against tiles; I could hear it running down the pitch and drumming onto the window. The fabric of the building trembled.

  Inside, however, it was quiet. I could no longer hear the whispering of the ghosts in the rooms below.

  No sounds, no apparitions, not even any ghost-fog.

  Just vicious cold.

  We gathered at last in the center of the attic. I was grimy, tense, and shivering; Lockwood, pale and irritable. George was trying to get a mass of sticky cobwebs off his rapier, rubbing the blade against the edge of his boot.

  “What do you think?” Lockwood said. “I’ve no idea where it can be. Any thoughts?”

  George raised a hand. “Yes. I’m hungry. We should eat.”

  I blinked at him. “How can you possibly think about eating now?”

  “Very easily. Mortal fear gives me an appetite.”

  Lockwood grinned. “Then it’s a pity you haven’t any sandwiches. You left them in your bag, back down with the ghosts.”

  “I know. I was thinking of sharing Lucy’s.”

  This made me roll my eyes. Mid-roll, my eyes stopped dead.

  “Lucy?” Lockwood was always first to notice when anything was wrong.

  I took a moment before replying. “Is it me,” I said slowly, “or is there something lying on that beam?”

  It was the crossbeam almost directly overhead. Cobwebs hung down from it, merging with the shadows of the eaves. Above was a funny patch of darkness that might have been part of the beam, or part of an object resting directly on it. You couldn’t really see it from below, except for something poking out on one side that might have been hair.

  We regarded it in silence.

  “Ladder, George,” Lockwood said.

&nb
sp; George went to get the ladder, pulling it upward through the hatch. “Those guys are still down there,” he reported. “Just standing around the chains. Looks like they’re waiting for something.”

  We set the ladder against the beam.

  “You want my advice?” In its jar, the ghost had stirred. “The worst thing you can do is go up and look. Just chuck a magnesium flare and run away.”

  I reported this to Lockwood. He shook his head. “If it’s the Source,” he said, “we have to seal it. One of us has to climb up. How about you, George? Seeing as how you went for the broom closet just now.”

  George’s face generally expresses as much emotion as a bowl of custard. It didn’t display overwhelming delight now.

  “Unless you want me to?” Lockwood said.

  “No, no…that’s fine. Hand me a net, then.”

  At the heart of every haunting is a Source—an object or place to which that particular ghostly phenomenon is tethered. If you snuff this out—for instance, by covering it with a Seal, such as a silver chain net—you seal up the supernatural power. So George took his net, ready-folded in its plastic case, and started up the ladder. Lockwood and I waited below.

  The ladder jerked and trembled as George climbed.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” the skull in the ghost-jar said.

  George climbed out of the lantern light, drew close to the shaded beam. I took my sword from my belt. Lockwood hefted his in his hand. We met each other’s eyes.

  “Yes, if anything’s going to happen,” Lockwood murmured, “I’d say it’s likely to happen just about—”

  Shimmering white tentacles erupted from the beam. They were glassy and featureless, with stubby tips. They uncoiled with ferocious speed—some aiming high for George; some striking low at Lockwood and me.

  “Just about now, really,” Lockwood said.

  Down swung the tentacles. We scattered, Lockwood diving toward the window, me toward the hatch. High above, George jerked away, dropping the chain net, losing his balance. The ladder toppled back. It wedged against the angle of the roof behind, knocking George’s feet clear, leaving him dangling by two hands from the topmost rung.

  A tendril flopped against the floorboards next to me, merged with them, went through. It was made of ectoplasmic matter. Unless you wanted to die, you had to prevent it touching your bare skin. I gave a frantic jump sideways, tripped, and dropped my sword.

  Worse than dropped it—it vanished through the open hatch to fall among the ghosts below.

  High above, things weren’t much better. Letting go of the ladder with one hand, George tore a magnesium flare from his belt and lobbed it at the coils. It missed them completely, erupted against the roof in a brilliant explosion, and sent a cascade of white-hot burning salt and iron down on Lockwood, setting his clothes aflame.

  That’s how it went with us, sometimes. One thing just led to another.

  “Oh, good start!” In the ghost-jar, the face had visibly perked up; it grinned cheerily at me as I bounded past, dodging the lunges from the nearest tentacle. “So you’re setting each other on fire, now? That’s a new one! What will you think of next?”

  Above me more tendrils of ghostly matter were emerging from the crossbeam and the rafters of the roof. Their nub-like heads protruded like baby ferns, blind and bone-white, before whipping outward across the breadth of the attic space. On the other side of the room, Lockwood had dropped his rapier. He staggered backward toward the window, the front of his clothes feathered with darting silver flames, his head craned back to avoid the heat.

  “Water!” he called. “Anyone got some water?”

  “Me!” I ducked under a glowing tentacle and reached inside my bag. Even as I found my plastic bottle, I was shouting a request of my own: “And I need a sword!”

  There was a rush of air through the attic, unnatural in its strength. Behind Lockwood, the window slammed open with a crash of breaking glass. Rain gusted through, bringing with it the howling of the storm. Lockwood was only two steps, maybe three, from the dreadful drop to the street below.

  “Water, Lucy!”

  “George! Your sword!”

  George heard. He understood. He gave a frantic wriggle in midair and just about avoided the blind thrust of another coil. His rapier was at his belt, glittering as he swung. He reached down, ripped the sword clear.

  I jumped over a slashing frond of plasm, spun around with the water bottle, and hurled it across to Lockwood.

  George threw his rapier to me.

  Watch this now. Sword and bottle, sailing through the air, twin trajectories, twin journeys, arcing beautifully through the mass of swirling tendrils toward Lockwood and me. Lockwood held out his hand. I held out mine.

  Remember I said there was that moment of sweet precision, when we jelled perfectly as a team?

  Yeah, well, this wasn’t it.

  The rapier shot past, missing me by miles. It skidded halfway across the floor.

  The bottle struck Lockwood right in the center of his forehead, knocking him out the window.

  There was a moment’s pause.

  “Is he dead?” the skull’s voice said. “Yay! Oh. No, he’s hanging on to the shutters. Shame. Still, this is definitely the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. You three really are incompetence on a stick.”

  Frantically dancing clear of the nearest tentacles, I tried to get a view of Lockwood. To my relief, the skull was right. Lockwood was hanging out over the drop, his body a rigid diagonal, clinging to the broken shutters. The wind howled around him, tugging his hair across his long, lean face, seeking to pluck him away into the November night. Happily, it was also buffeting his burning coat. The silver flames were dwindling. They began to die.

  Which was what we were all in danger of doing. Any second now.

  George’s sword was only yards away, but it might as well have been in Edinburgh. Ghostly coils swirled around it like anemones waving in a shallow sea.

  “You can get it!” George called. “Do a cool somersault over them or something!”

  “You do one! This is your fault! Why can’t you ever throw things accurately?”

  “Coming from you! You chucked that bottle like a girl!”

  “I am a girl. And I put Lockwood’s fire out for him, didn’t I?”

  Well, that was sort of true. Over at the window, our leader was hauling himself back inside. His face was green, his coat gently smoking. He had a neat red circle on his forehead where the bottle had struck. He wasn’t exactly tossing thanks my way.

  A particularly long and silver tentacle had homed in on me; it was steadily pushing me back toward the hatch, among cobwebs large as laundry.

  “Faster, Lucy!” That was the skull in the jar. “It’s right behind you!”

  “How about a little help here?” I gasped as a tendril brushed my arm. I could feel the stinging cold right through the fabric of the coat.

  “Me?” The hollow eyes in the face became hoops of surprise. “A ‘dirty old pile of bones,’ as you call me? What could I do?”

  “Some advice! Evil wisdom! Anything!”

  “It’s a Changer—you need something strong. Not a flare—you’ll just set fire to something. Probably yourself. Use silver to drive it back. Then you can get the sword.”

  “I don’t have any silver.” We had plenty of silver Seals in the bag, but that was near Lockwood, on the other side of the room.

  “What about that stupid necklace you always wear? What’s that made of?”

  Oh. Of course. The one Lockwood had given me that summer. It was silver. Silver burns ghostly substances. All ghosts hate it, even powerful Changers that manifest as ectoplasmic coils. Not the strongest weapon I’d ever used, but it just might do.

  Squatting back against the angled roof, I put my hands behind my neck and undid the clasp. When I brought my fingers around, cobwebs hung from them in greasy clumps. I held the necklace tight, and whirled it around and around my fist. The end made contact with the nearest
tendril. Plasm burned; the tentacle snapped upward and away. Other coils flinched back, sensing the silver’s nearness. For the first time, I cleared a safe space around me. I stood up, supporting myself against the rafter behind.

  As my fingers touched the wood, I was hit by a sudden wave of emotion. Not my emotion—this feeling came from all about me. It seeped out of the fabric of the attic, out of the wood and slates, and the nails that held them there. It seeped out of the flailing coils of the ghost itself. It was a vile sensation—a sickly, shifting mix of loneliness and resentment, speared with cold, hard rage. The strength of it beat against my temples as I looked across the room.

  A terrible thing had happened here, a terrible injustice. And from that act of violence came the energy that drove the vengeful spirit. I imagined its silent coils slipping through the floor toward the poor lodgers sleeping in the rooms below….

  “Lucy!” My mind cleared. It was Lockwood. He had stepped away from the window. He’d picked up his sword. One-handed, he slashed a complicated pattern through the air, shearing through the nearest tentacles. They burst like bubbles, scattering iridescent pearls of plasm. Even with his coat all charred and crispy, even with that red circle on his forehead, he had reasserted himself. His face was pale in the spectral light as he smiled across the attic at me. “Lucy,” he called, “we need to finish this.”

  “It’s angry!” I gasped, ducking under a grasping coil. “I got a connection with the ghost! It’s angry about something!”

  “You don’t say?” High above, George raised his knees to avoid the thrashing tentacles. “Your sensitivity is amazing, Luce. How I wish I had your Talent.”

  “Yes, that isn’t the most surprising insight you’ve ever given us.” Lockwood bent over his bag. “I’ll get a Seal. Meanwhile, you might just want to rescue George….”