It felt odd to have the time now to sit out there. I was in a kind of limbo, neither part of Lockwood & Co. nor entirely separated from it. And my emotions were similarly conflicted. Half of me still believed I should be somewhere else, holding fast to a solitary career that couldn’t imperil Lockwood and the others. This side of me felt deeply uneasy about asking them to help find the skull. It would be a dangerous job, no question about it. And yet…I couldn’t feel entirely guilty. Because right now I needed assistance. I needed some friends. And hadn’t George told me outside the Guppy house that Lockwood had been continually throwing himself into danger these last few months? So what did it matter if I asked him to help me do something tricky? Why should I feel bad about that? What would it actually change?
It was hard to make sense of what I was feeling. The only thing I did know for certain as I sat in the garden was that it was nice to be back, even if only for a short while.
Shortly after lunch, Lockwood returned, smelling vaguely of rotten wood and seaweed, so I knew he’d been to see Flo Bones. The first part of his plan was apparently under way.
“I had to promise her a year’s supply of licorice allsorts,” he said, “but I talked her into it. The next relic-men’s market is scheduled for tomorrow night. Flo’s going, so she’ll find out exactly when and where. She’ll get us to the door. Once there, guys built like gorillas will vet us. If we pass muster, we’ll be allowed into the meeting. If we don’t, we’ll be beaten senseless and our limp bodies will be tossed into the Thames. I think passing muster is the option to go for.”
“I agree,” I said. “So how are we going to do that?”
But Lockwood wouldn’t say.
The next thing that happened was that Lockwood and Holly made a trip back to my apartment in Tooting to fetch my clothes. I wasn’t allowed to come. In due course they returned, the visit having passed without incident, except that they’d bumped into my neighbor across the landing.
“He told us he’d heard noises last night,” Lockwood said. “They were coming from your room. He peeped through the spy-hole in his door and saw two men with flashlights standing in your doorway. One of them had a gun. When they saw the place was empty, they left. I’d say it was a good thing you came to us, Luce, and didn’t go back home.”
Once again I couldn’t disagree.
Holly handed me a couple of bags of my belongings. Her expression was somber. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Lucy,” she said, “but they…they messed up your place really badly.”
I stared at her. “Oh no. What did they do?”
“Oh, it was awful. Your things were scattered all over the floor, the bedclothes strewn everywhere, your drawers open and the stuff all jumbled up. There was no rhyme or reason to it. It was like a bomb had gone off. I’m so, so sorry. You must feel dreadful.”
I avoided Lockwood’s eye. “Yes, I’m really distraught they made it look so messy,” I said. “I’m glad I didn’t see that.”
Anyway, I had my clothes.
At the end of the afternoon I volunteered to make an early supper, and, under George’s supervision, I put together a swift spaghetti Bolognese. Holly had provided sponge cake for dessert.
“How come she’s suddenly baking now?” I asked. “She never touched cake before.”
George was staring at his map of England on the kitchen wall. He spoke absently. “Oh, Hol’s still fixated on salads, but don’t worry. I’m corrupting her slowly. We’ll have her scarfing junk food by and by. Have you added oregano to the sauce?”
“You already asked, and yes, I have. I think we’re almost done. What is that map, anyway? Current hauntings?”
“Mmm?” George was somewhere far away. “No…exactly the opposite. These are historic ones, going back in time to the start of the Problem. Major outbreaks by decade.” He pushed open the basement door and roared down the stairs. “Grub’s ready! I got the info by trawling through old newspapers,” he added. “You know me.”
Lockwood and Holly emerged from below. I heated the plates under the hot tap, and served up the meal, staring at the poster through a pleasant cloud of hot steam. “I don’t get it, George,” I said. “There have been thousands of outbreaks over the years. You’ve got a lot of pins on there, but nowhere near enough to represent everything.”
“That’s because I’m only recording the first twenty clusters in each area,” George said. “The colors represent different decades, and you can see from the rings how the Problem’s gradually spread outward over the years. You remember the Chelsea case, Lucy, how I traced the original Source of that outbreak back to Aickmere’s department store by looking at cases over time? Well, this is the same thing, on a much bigger scale. And it confirms what the history books tell us: the Problem began to the southeast of London, in the county of Kent.”
“Where Marissa Fittes and Tom Rotwell were the first to fight it.” Lockwood was doling out steaming clumps of spaghetti, slathered with sauce. “This looks great, by the way, Lucy. What are those shriveled black things?”
“Mushrooms, I think. Oh no, those are the mushrooms. Actually, I don’t know what they are….Enjoy your meal.”
“The Fittes and Rotwell agencies have come a long way in fifty years,” George said as we ate. “You know there’s a statue in the town where it all began, where the two founders began investigating local ghosts? I’ve been down to see it. Frankly, it’s not very good, but it shows the two of them as teenagers, as they were when they destroyed the Mud Lane Phantom—with Tom Rotwell holding his homemade sword, and Marissa beside him with her little lantern. The two objects that became the symbols of their separate agencies. It’s funny to think of them actually being used, that first time.”
“Isn’t there a story about Marissa’s lantern?” True to form, Holly had piled her plate with salad, but I was pleased to see a little mound of spaghetti, too. She twirled her fork with a delicate motion of her wrist. “Didn’t she get it from a garden shed?”
George nodded. “From her parents’ summer house. She used it when the ghost’s psychic field began to mess around with the workings of her flashlight. They were good innovators, Tom and Marissa; they were the first to experiment with iron and silver. Tom also tried taking caged cats into haunted houses, to see if they worked as early warning systems. He gave it up, though. The cats went crazy.”
“Doesn’t sound like a very kind thing to do,” Holly said. “Poor cats.”
“Bet they were more effective than that bell thing you had, though, George,” I said.
George sucked in a string of spaghetti. “The PEWS device? Maybe—but at least Rotwell’s are still innovating. They’re trying to come up with new ideas, like Tom did. The Fittes Agency doesn’t bother with that so much. They just stick to rapiers and raw Talent, which was always Marissa’s policy.”
“Well, the founders were brilliant in different ways,” Holly said. “We’re all in their debt. They devoted their lives to keeping us safe.”
“Took its toll on them, though,” Lockwood said. “Both died young.”
I thought of the photographs of Marissa I’d seen at Fittes House, the wrinkled woman dressed in black. “Not that young, surely. I’ve seen pictures. She was pretty old.”
“Only in her forties. Prematurely aged.”
“Anyway, it’s interesting to see how the Problem has spread like any other epidemic,” George added. “It behaves like a disease, rippling out from an original reservoir or core area: first Kent, then the southeast, then London, then the country.”
“In spite of Fittes’s and Rotwell’s best efforts,” I said.
“Yeah,” George said, “in spite of them.”
At the end of the meal, Lockwood made an announcement. “You all know that tomorrow is the relic-men’s night-market,” he said, “and we assume the Winkmans will be on hand to buy up all the best stuff. From what Lucy’s told us, the whispering skull is likely to feature as one of the transactions, so we need to be there, too. The aim is
to get in, snatch the skull, hopefully find out a little more about this mysterious black market collector that the Winkmans are working for, and get out again—all without being spotted, cornered, and gutted with a fish knife. Nothing too hard. Flo’s going to take us to the location, but to get inside, we’ll need something that’ll guarantee safe passage.”
“A Source, you mean?” Holly asked.
“Exactly. I think two of us will go—probably Lucy and me—and that means we need two top-notch psychic Sources.”
“Well, where would we get those?” George said. “The skull was one, but that’s been pinched. We’ve got some bits and pieces knocking around the office, like that shriveled pirate’s hand that Holly’s always wanting to trash. We could use that, I suppose. Mind you, I am fond of it. I know it’s black with tar, and one of its fingers is coming loose, but, well, it’s got sentimental value….”
“Relax. I’m not going to take the hand.” Lockwood sat back. “No, we need something that no one’s seen before—something so devilishly interesting, they won’t look closely at who’s bringing it. The good news is, I think I know where to find precisely that.” He looked at his watch. “It’s not yet dusk. We’ve got time. I’ll show you now.”
“Sorry,” I said, “but where are we going?”
Lockwood smiled around at us. His face was calm and set.
“It’s all right; you don’t need your coats. It’s in Jessica’s room, upstairs.”
Lockwood had never been very forthcoming about his past. Quite the opposite: since the day I first met him, mystery had clung to his vanished family and the circumstances of their departure from this world. Though the house he lived in—and its eclectic furniture and contents—were memorials to his parents, Lockwood rarely spoke about them, and he almost never mentioned his sister, Jessica, who had died in her bedroom so many years earlier. Despite this, a few details had gradually leaked out, and I knew enough to see how they affected him.
Jessica Lockwood, six years older than little Anthony, had looked after him in the years following his parents’ unexpected deaths. Then, when he was nine years old, she had died, too—victim to a Visitor that had attacked her in her room. Since then, Lockwood had shut his grief away, clamped it deep inside, where it still burned fiercely, fueling his remorseless pursuit of ghosts of all kinds. And the room had been shut away, too, a dark, closed-off portion of the house. It was partly an unvisited shrine to Jessica, partly a storeroom for all the mementos Lockwood had of his parents and his sister. It was also a containment zone, for a powerful death-glow still blazed where his sister had fallen. Iron sheeting coated the door and silver wards hung in the room, but they had not yet been necessary. Jessica had never come back.
Lockwood led the way upstairs, Holly following, George and I lingering behind.
“But hold on, George,” I whispered. “What about Holly? Does she know…?”
“About Jessica? Yeah, she knows.”
“He told her? Oh…okay.”
Obviously it was good that Lockwood was loosening up about his past, sharing his secrets a little. It had taken ages for him to open up to me. It was healthier that he could do it more easily now. Obviously it was good that Holly knew. Obviously I was pleased.
The curtains were drawn, the room was dark. Lockwood led us in.
I hadn’t been in the bedroom for months, but nothing had changed. Nothing ever changed in that cold square space. As ever, the death-glow, pale and oval, shone with piercing beauty above the bed. As before, the force of it rustled the roots of my hair and made my teeth ache. The boxes and crates that half filled the room in the perpetual dusk had their usual array of protective lavender pots, and the silver charms still hung, tinkling, from the ceiling.
Lockwood had put on his sunglasses to shield his eyes from the supernatural glow. He switched on the light. The glow vanished, but its power remained. He didn’t open the curtains, but patted the nearest box. “I’m thinking that we should find something in one of these,” he said, and his voice was soft. “You know that my parents were folkloric researchers, searching for an answer to the Problem. They traveled all over the place, studying the belief systems of other cultures. Wherever they went, they brought back junk. Their favorite pieces are on the walls downstairs, but there’re things up here that have never been opened. Some of these crates only arrived here after they died. All we have to do is choose something that would fascinate a black marketeer. So…Lucy, why don’t you pick a box?”
“Are you sure?” I kept my voice down, too. Somehow, none of us wanted to speak at full volume in Jessica’s room. “But Lockwood—this is your parents’ collection….”
He shrugged. “Yeah, and it’s gathering dust. Let’s put it to good use. Pick a box.”
Still I hesitated. I looked at the bed, at the white coverlet. Beneath that was the terrible black ectoplasm burn left in the mattress when Jessica died. It had happened while she was sorting through one of those very chests. “But isn’t that”—I spoke with extra care—“a little bit dangerous?”
Lockwood’s eyes were hidden, but I thought a flicker of impatience crossed his face. “No. It’s not dark yet. And, don’t forget, my mother and father packed these up originally. It was only because something was dropped—and its Seal broke—that the ghost got out at all.”
None of us said anything. Yes, it had gotten out—and killed his sister. And Lockwood, still a little boy, had been the one who found her. Afterward, in his rage and grief, he had destroyed the ghost. I knew this because once, alone in this same room, my Talent had looped me back to the past, and I’d heard the echo of the tragedy. I couldn’t erase the memory from my mind.
“Even so, Lockwood,” George said, “we don’t want to mess around in here. What do the boxes contain?”
“Search me. The same sort of things as on the walls downstairs, I guess. Curios from other cultures; devices linked to dealing with spirits. Bound to be a lot of junk, but I bet there’s good stuff, too.” Lockwood removed a vase of lavender from the top of a crate, his movements swift and brittle. You could sense the anger still contained in him. His fingers tapped the wood. “You could try this box, look—or this—or one of those….Come on, Luce, it’s your skull we’re going after. You make a decision. Which would you like?”
“This one, then,” I said.
“Good choice, Luce…good choice. I like the look of it, too.” He took his knife from his belt, eased it into the crack beneath the crate lid, and began to work it around. “Just like opening a tin of sardines,” he said. “There we go. So then, let’s have a little gander at what’s in…here—”
A twist, a crack; Holly, George, and I all flinched. The lid came loose; Lockwood wrenched it back and let it drop behind the crate. A rich, resinous fragrance filled the air.
“That’s frankincense,” Holly murmured.
The crate was filled to the brim with yellow-brown wood shavings, acting as protective packing. Lockwood plunged his hand inside. “Aha…” He drew out a broad and bulky package, wrapped in something dry and papery that looked like straw. He held it gingerly, letting shavings fall onto the faded carpet at his feet.
“Careful,” Holly said.
“Don’t worry. We’re not doing this after dark. That was the mistake my sister made.”
I saw now that the wrapping was a kind of reed matting, very old and fragile, which disintegrated at Lockwood’s touch. He brushed it away. Beneath it was something bright and colorful that showed like flowers coming out from under melting snow.
“What is it?” I asked. “They look like—”
“Feathers.” Lockwood gave the object a shake. Like a tablecloth unfurling, it suddenly opened to an unexpected size: a cloth of blue and purple feathers that were small and neat and lovely, stitched so close together they appeared seamless. I didn’t know which species of bird they came from, but I could tell that it lived far away in some warm and forested land. The dowdy, derelict room was lit by it; we stared at it in won
der.
“The other side’s pretty nifty, too,” Lockwood said. He turned it in his hands, and we saw the framework of minute silver links, tight as chain mail, that fused the feathers together. There was a silver clasp halfway along one edge, with a dangling hood beside it.
“You put it around your neck,” George said. “It’s a cape.”
“A spirit-cape,” Lockwood said. “Witch doctors or shamans used to wear them.”
“It’s beautiful,” Holly murmured.
“More than that…it had a useful purpose.” Lockwood laid it out over the top of the nearest packing case. “The shamans were wise men; they spoke to their dead ancestors. They did this in spirit houses, where—”
“Sorry, what?” I asked. “A spirit house? And how do you know all this, anyway?”
“My parents,” Lockwood said. “They wrote articles about it. They thought the beliefs of other cultures might throw light on the Problem. Studied ideas about ghosts and spirits—saw what was different and what was the same. Whether it worked or not wasn’t the point. They wanted to find out what people believed. They were after clues. I’ve got their papers somewhere….” The edginess he had displayed since entering the room had left him, soothed, perhaps, by the loveliness of the cape.
“And did they?” George asked. “Did they come to any conclusions about the Problem?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” Lockwood took out another package wrapped in matting. “Looks like there might be another cape here….” He delved deeper and, taking out a small wooden box, looked inside. He shut it hastily. “Ooh, I’m not sure I want to get that out. Never touch a mummified body part if you don’t know where it’s been. That’s my motto.”
“Holds true with un-mummified ones, too,” George said. “That’s the motto I live by.”
The Screaming Staircase Page 17
