Lockwood & Co. Book Three: The Hollow Boy

by Jonathan Stroud

  Everywhere we looked, people thronged. Bands of agents, trotting after their supervisors, patting their belt pouches, testing their swords; long-haired Sensitives, lining up drippily at the tea urns like rows of weeping willow trees; night-watch kids, be-scarfed and watch-capped, clustering as close to the heaters as they dared; suited adult DEPRAC workers rushing back and forth like they actually did something for a living beyond letting children enter a psychically ravaged area of London on their behalf. A hair salon on one corner had been commandeered; here representatives of Mullet and Sons, the rapier dealers, had created an outpost where swords could be replaced, repaired, or just scraped free of ectoplasm, once each team returned from its nightly expedition into the haunted wastes of Chelsea.

  At the western end of the square, imposing iron barriers, ten feet high and fixed into concrete bases, had been dragged across to block the entrance to the street beyond. This street was the King’s Road, which ran from Sloane Square for more than a mile southwest to the lavender factories of Fulham Broadway. In more ordinary times, it was the spine of a popular shopping district, with residential streets radiating from it like the barbs of a feather. The past six weeks had changed all that. Now a single gate in the barrier, locked and guarded, provided the only access, with a squat watchtower of scaffolding and wooden boards rising beside it.

  As arranged with Barnes, we made straight for the tower.

  The inspector’s deputy, Officer Ernest Dobbs, met us at the foot of the gantry. He was a stolid young man, a typical DEPRAC officer from the tip of his cauliflower ears to the spit-and-polish predictability of his studded boots. He regarded us skeptically, eyes lingering on the wad of gauze now taped to Lockwood’s forehead above his left eye. Then he led us up the steps. At the top he stood aside and waved a negligent hand.

  “Here you go,” he said. “Welcome to Chelsea.”

  The ghost-lamps of the King’s Road were still on. They stretched away into the wintry dark, two strings of flickering white orbs, carrying with them the dark fronts of the buildings on either side. Dark, but not entirely dark: at certain windows, faint spectral glows could be seen, dim blues and greens that pulsed and wavered, and here and there went suddenly out. Far off, at the junction with a side street, a pale figure flitted away into the night. I heard snatches of screaming carried on the wind—fragments of noise that neither started nor stopped, but just repeated on a mindless loop.

  A small group of agents clustered below a lamp not far from the barrier. Their supervisor, a woman, gave an order; they crossed into a house and were gone.

  Near them, one of the shops had its window smashed and gaping. Glass lay strewn across the sidewalk, mixed with iron and salt. On the opposite side, a great black stain was smeared across a shop front and the sidewalk had been blistered by a magnesium blast. Leaves and twigs from recent storms lay on the road and on the cars parked at its curbs. Twists of newspaper fluttered in doorways. Many of the buildings had ghost-marks daubed on the windows. The entrance to a side street was thickly strewn with iron.

  No one lived or worked here. You could feel the atmosphere, despite the barrier and the damping effect of all that iron. The air crackled with wrongness. It was a dead zone.

  “See that delicatessen on the left?” Dobbs said. “We had a Lurker there, just behind the cold meats counter. Victorian gent in a stovepipe hat. Then there were Glimmers in the pub opposite, and also the Specter of a one-armed mail carrier, don’t ask me why. Night before that, Wraiths chased Grimble agents down the alley by the bookies there. The Wraiths were destroyed by flares when they reached the main road, but it was close. That’s just this bit. Chelsea goes on for miles. Shows you what we’re up against.”

  Somewhere in the mists, a faint tac-tac-tac sound started, soft, steady, and rhythmic.

  “Digging up a body somewhere,” Dobbs added. “We’re finding Sources, but none of them’s the heart of the cluster.” He turned away.

  I looked beyond him at the spotlit oasis of Sloane Square. “So all this activity isn’t making much difference?”

  “It’s not making any difference at all.”

  We found Inspector Barnes in his command center, a solemn brick building on one corner of the square, which in more ordinary times functioned as the Chelsea Working Men’s Club. We showed our IDs, passed through a busy corridor lined with salt-bags, went up some stairs and into the main lounge. It was a room that, even when filled with desks, filing cabinets, and shirtsleeved DEPRAC personnel, still carried an odor of pork rinds and beer. At its far end Barnes was signing papers for an underling on a table laced with half-drunk cups of coffee. Behind his back, a large-scale street map of Chelsea had been peppered with dozens of multicolored pins.

  Lockwood and I found chairs; we sat, waiting for Barnes. George got out a folded piece of paper and began poring over it, occasionally gazing at the map on the wall. I passed around pieces of chocolate, watching Lockwood out of the corner of my eye. With his pale skin, open collar, and ruffled, unkempt hair, he looked more like a consumptive poet than an agent. His gauze bandage, which had been taped at a piratical angle over his eyebrow, was Holly Munro’s work. She had insisted on fixing it before allowing him out, and had almost succeeded in coming, too, “to keep an eye on things.” Lockwood had declined her offer, but my satisfaction hadn’t lasted long. He had remained quiet and withdrawn throughout the journey. In fact, he’d scarcely spoken to me all day.

  He sat now, gingerly fingering his forehead, as Barnes finished with the papers, answered someone’s query, shouted at someone else, took a swig of cold coffee, and turned to us for the first time. “So, this is what you wanted,” he said. “You’re at the nerve center of the Chelsea outbreak. What do you want me to tell you?”

  “We’ve had a peek over the wall,” Lockwood said. “Looks fairly grim.”

  “If you want to go in, you can be my guest.” Barnes rubbed wearily at his mustache. “But you can see what we’re up against right here.” He jerked a thumb at the map behind him. “That’s the sum total of spectral encounters in Chelsea these last few weeks. It’s a super-cluster, complete chaos. The worst I’ve seen in thirty years. Questions?”

  George squinted at the pins. “What’s the color-coding?”

  Barnes sniffed. “Greens are Type Ones, yellows Type Twos. Reds indicate an encounter where someone has been attacked. Blacks”—he scratched at his mustache and looked at his knuckles before setting his hands softly on the desk—“blacks mark a death. There’ve been twenty-three so far, including agents. So you can see that, roughly speaking, an area of half a square mile has experienced this extreme upsurge. Yet up until four weeks ago, Chelsea was no worse than anywhere else.”

  “Any pattern in terms of sub-types?” Lockwood asked. “Any kind of ghost that’s more frequent than the rest?”

  “It’s random. Mostly Shades and Lurkers, of course; but plenty of Specters and Phantasms. Wraiths, too, and rarer kinds; we had a couple of Limbless and a Screaming Spirit. In many cases we’ve found their Sources—but the overall picture’s not changed.”

  “How much of the district’s been evacuated now?”

  “Most of the King’s Road and surrounding streets. Not the western end—the attacks taper off sharply there. But most of the shopping district is closed, and we’ve got hundreds of people camping out in churches and sports centers. As you must have heard, they blame DEPRAC. Some of the ghost-cults are getting lively. There’s been violence, protests. Unrest is spreading.”

  “I hear Fittes and Rotwell are going to put on a nice show to make everyone feel better,” I said.

  Barnes tapped the tips of his fingers together with deliberate care. “Yes, the carnival. It’s Steve Rotwell’s idea—a great big party, all about ‘reclaiming the night.’ There’s going to be a grand procession from the Fittes tomb to the Rotwell one. Floats, balloons, free food and drink. The lot. And when that’s all been swept up, we’ll still have this little mess to sort out.”

  Ther
e was a silence. “You need to find the heart of the super-cluster,” George said.

  “Think we don’t know that?” Barnes’s pouchy eyes, small and shrunken with exhaustion, glittered balefully at him. “We’re not stupid. And it so happens we know precisely where the heart is. You can see it for yourself.” He took a cane from his table, leaned back, and prodded at the map. “We’re here, on the eastern side. And here’s the King’s Road running down, straight into the area with the thickest density of hauntings. Now, if you analyze the position of the pins, Cubbins, you’ll find that the exact geographical center is here, where the King’s Road meets Sydney Street.”

  “And what’s at that corner?” I asked.

  “Barry McGill’s Tip Top Fish and Chip Shoppe,” Barnes said. “That’s its name. I don’t eat there myself. And it’s clean. Well, when I say clean, I mean supernaturally so. Its problem is grease, not ectoplasm. Anyway, we’ve taken it apart and found nothing. The shops and houses around it are innocent too. We’ve checked back, and the history of that area is quiet. No obvious plagues or atrocities—which are what we always expect to find at the heart of a cluster. So that’s your precious center, Cubbins.” He tossed the cane onto the table. “What do you say to that?”

  “It’s obviously not the center,” George said.

  Barnes uttered an oath. “And you know where is, I suppose?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Well, feel free to find it for me. Right, I’ll get you passes to the containment zone, Lockwood, as Miss Wintergarden requested. Try not to get yourself killed, and—more importantly”—Barnes picked up papers and sat back in his chair; he was already moving on to something else—“do your best to keep out of my sight.”

  “I’m going in,” Lockwood said, when we were back out in the square a while later, holding passes with the ink still wet. “I want to walk around a bit, get a feel for the place. Don’t worry, I won’t engage with anything. What about you, George?”

  George had his faraway look, the one that made him look like a constipated owl. “At the moment,” he said, “it would be a waste of time for me to go in there. I’d rather do a quick errand. Come with me, if you want, Luce. You could be useful.”

  I hesitated, looked over at Lockwood. “Depends if Lockwood needs me.”

  “Oh, no thanks. I’ll be all right.” His smile was automatic, unengaged. “You go with George. I’ll see you both back home.” A wave, a swish of the coat; he walked away toward the barrier. After a few steps he was lost behind agents, Sensitives, technicians.

  I felt a jab in the center of my chest—pain, and anger, too. I spun on my heel, rubbed my hands together in a show of enthusiasm I didn’t altogether feel. “So where are we going, George? Some midnight library?”

  “Not quite. I’ll show you.”

  He led the way out of the square, south past DEPRAC cordons, down another street strewn with evidence of the protests: discarded placards, bottles, litter of many kinds.

  “This is terrible,” I said, stepping among the debris. “People are going mad.”

  George stepped over a broken AGENTS KEEP OUT sign. “Are they? I don’t know. They’re scared. They need to let their tension out. Never good to bottle things up—is it, Lucy?”

  “I suppose.”

  We crossed an empty street. Away to the right I could see another one of the iron barricades—we were following Chelsea’s perimeter toward the Thames.

  “So you think Barnes is wrong somehow?” I said. “The center of the super-cluster’s not at the center? How does that work?”

  “Well,” George said, “Barnes is making a lot of assumptions. He’s treating this like an ordinary haunting event, when it so plainly isn’t. At this scale, how can it be?”

  I didn’t reply. It didn’t matter; after a moment George continued as if I had.

  “Let’s think about it,” he said. “On the most basic level, what’s a Source? No one really knows, but let’s call it a weak point, where the barrier between this world and the next has grown thin. We saw that in Kensal Green, didn’t we, with the bone glass. That was a window, somehow. A ghost is tied to the Source. Trauma or violence or injustice of some kind stops a spirit from moving on, and, like a dog tethered to a post, it circles that object or place until someone severs the connection. Okay. So what’s a cluster? There are two kinds. One is when a single terrible event has created a whole lot of ghosts in one fell swoop. Blitz bombs did that, and plague, and there was that hotel in Hampton Wick that had been destroyed in a fire, remember? We found more than twenty crispy-fried Visitors in the abandoned wing. The other kind is when there’s a powerful original haunting that gradually spreads its influence over the area. Its ghosts kill others and so, over many years, a troupe of spirits, from different times and places, is assembled. Combe Carey Hall was a great example of that, and Lavender Lodge. It’s this second type of cluster that DEPRAC’s assuming is going on here.”

  “Well, it must be,” I said. “There’s no connection between all the Visitors Dobbs was going on about. They’re all from different times and places.”

  George shook his head. “Yeah, but what’s triggering them? Barnes is looking for some key ghost that’s igniting all the other hauntings in this area. But I think he’s missing a trick. These ghosts haven’t been building up slowly; they’ve all become super-active almost overnight. Two months ago the Problem wasn’t any worse here than anywhere else in London. Now we’ve got whole streets being evacuated.” He crossed the street beside me, shoelaces flapping, hands weaving as if physically molding his idea. “What if it isn’t some terrible ancient event that’s igniting all these spirits, but something terrible that’s happening now?”

  I looked at him. “Such as what?”

  “I haven’t the faintest notion.”

  “You mean like lots of people dying?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “People aren’t going missing. There’s no evidence of any disaster going on. Call me picky, George,” I said, “but that doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  He stopped and grinned at me. “Nor does Barnes’s theory. That’s what’s so exciting. Anyway, next up,” he went on, “we need a bit of expert advice.”

  “One of your powdery old pals from the Archives?”

  “On the contrary. We’re going to see Flo Bones.”

  I stopped and stared at him. That, I hadn’t expected. Florence Bonnard, aka Flo Bones, was a relic-girl of our acquaintance. She dug for psychic jetsam on the Thames shoreline and sold it on the black market. She had decent psychic abilities, it was true, and had given us invaluable help from time to time; it was also true that she wore garbage bags, slept in a box under London Bridge, and could be smelled two clear blocks away. Tramps had been known to cross the street to get upwind of her. Which would have been acceptable if she’d been sweet and gentle-natured. Sadly, talking to her was like striding naked through a thornbush: not impossible, but there was a definite element of risk.

  “Why?” I demanded. “Why are we going to see her?” You can tell I put a bit of emphasis into it.

  George took his map out of his pocket. “Because Flo is the unwashed queen of the river, and the river marks the southwestern boundary of the outbreak zone. Look here: the outbreak forms a sort of funnel shape with the Thames along one side. There must have been alterations in activity that Flo will have noticed. I want her perspective on it before we go any further. Will Barnes or Dobbs or anyone have thought to chat with her? I don’t think so.”

  “They won’t have chatted to the carrion crows, either, or the foxes on the rubbish dumps,” I said. “Doesn’t necessarily make it worth doing.”

  Even so, I went with him.

  For an occupation that was officially classified as criminal, the relic-men had a pretty well trodden set of haunts: certain pubs and cafés along the riverbank where they met and bartered their nightly hauls. George and I did the rounds and, a couple of hours later, discovered Flo.

&nbs
p; She was outside an eatery in Battersea, picking at her evening breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon in a grubby Styrofoam tray. As usual she wore the odious blue puffer jacket that thoroughly masked any human shape, as well as carrying the knives and rods and mud picks of her trade. Her straw hat was pushed back, exposing her blond hair, her pale face, and the shrewd lines at the corners of her eyes. I wondered, as I often did, what she would have looked like if she’d had a bath and all-around fumigation. She wasn’t that much older than me.

  She glanced at us, nodded, and continued making fast work with the plastic fork. We drew as close as was comfortable, watching her shovel the yellow globules into her mouth. “Cubbins,” she said, “Carlyle.”

  “Flo.”

  “Where’s Locky?” The fork paused. “Off with his new girl, is he?”

  I blinked. “No…” I said. “She doesn’t come out on cases. She’s not even an agent, really. More of a secretary and housecleaner than anything.” I scowled at Flo. “How d’you even know about her?”

  She scraped unconcernedly at the corner of the tray. “Didn’t.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s been eighteen months since he hired you. That’s about standard. I figured he’d have prob’ly moved on to the next one.”

  “Actually,” George said, stepping between us and nudging my hand away from my rapier hilt, “Lockwood’s busy working on the outbreak. He’s sent us to ask you something.”

  “A question or a favor? Either way, what’s in it for me?” Bright teeth gleamed.

  “Aha.” George ferreted in a dark corner of his coat. “I have licorice! Lovely tasty licorice…Or maybe I don’t…’S’funny, I must’ve eaten it.” He gave a shrug. “I’ll have to owe you.”