“You’ve got to admit, Kipps,” George said, “you didn’t get a night like this when you were working for Fittes. Doesn’t it make you feel better?”
“Feel better about what?”
“About being you. Watch out!” With a roar of fury, Steve Rotwell had thrown caution to the wind; he sprang across the cart in a single bound, took two great strides, and leaped up onto the platform, where he swung his sword at Kipps. Another blade swung to meet it; they collided directly above Kipps’s head. Imagine an upside-down skull-and-crossbones flag and you’d have the moment perfectly.
It was Lockwood’s rapier, of course, and for a few heartbeats he and Rotwell remained locked in that position, both straining, neither moving. Kipps had been frozen for an instant; now his neck slowly concertinaed down into his shoulders until his head was clear of the shivering blades. White-faced, he lurched away.
Steve Rotwell was taller than Lockwood, and considerably heavier. He exerted his weight on the sword; Lockwood, by careful twists and adjustments of his slim wrist, offset the force. Otherwise neither moved.
“I made a prediction earlier,” Steve Rotwell said. “Do you recall it?”
“I do,” Lockwood said. “You said I’d cross you.” He gestured around at the burning building, at the screaming employees disappearing into the distance. “Does this count as crossing you? If so, congratulations—you were right.”
“That wasn’t all.” Rotwell jumped back, swinging his sword away. He kicked a spar of burning wood at Lockwood, who jumped clear; it shattered against the crate behind him in a starburst of sparks. “I promised to deal with you when that happened. And so I shall.”
He drove forward, twirling his rapier in a series of grandiose loops. Lockwood parried him once, twice, a third time, but was forced backward off the platform. He jumped lightly onto the earth, with Rotwell thudding down behind him.
“Years of work,” Rotwell said. “Years of careful study, and you’ve ruined it in one evening.”
“You brought it on yourself!” Lockwood was still on the defensive, straining to cope with the older man’s savage attack. “Your experiments unleashed terror on Aldbury Castle! It’s because of you that so many ghosts were raised! Dozens of people were killed! And all because your man in iron armor was out there, walking on the Other Side, stirring up the dead.” He gave a deft shimmy and struck at Rotwell’s wrist, but the blow glanced off the ornate hand-guard of the sword.
Steve Rotwell drew back. “You do know more than I expected…but I don’t think you understand it all. If you did, you’d realize that the unfortunate deaths of the villagers was a small price to pay.” With a twirling double stroke he knocked Lockwood back into the suspended iron chain. “And the same can certainly be said of your death, too.”
He aimed an almighty blow downward; Lockwood ducked aside and the sword sliced straight through the iron chain. The portion of chain attached to the post fell to the floor. The rest was at once sucked inside the circle, like spaghetti being drawn into a giant mouth, and it disappeared.
Lockwood stumbled away, closer to the circle and its column of circling ghosts. He looked weary, and I thought I understood why. My own experience beyond the circle had left me weakened. My limbs were like water, my head still spun. If Lockwood felt anything like me, it was probably all he could do to hold the sword.
“He’s beating him,” Holly gasped.
Kipps nodded. “He’s got Lockwood cold.”
“Or so he thinks.” George had a final standard flare in his shoulder belt. He took it out, winked at us, and hurled it straight at Rotwell’s head. At least, that’s what I assume he was aiming for. In actuality, the flare sailed clean past and landed by the edge of the circle of chains, where it exploded with great ferocity. When the smoke cleared, fires burned on the ground and the chains were blackened and twisted. Some of the links had almost split. At once the shapes inside the circle began to cluster at that spot.
“Ooh, that’s not good,” Kipps said. “Cubbins, where did you ever learn to throw?”
“He didn’t, basically,” I said. “That’s the problem.”
I ran past them and jumped off the platform.
Lockwood and Rotwell were clashing blades once more. Lockwood’s sword was moving with desperate speed, but his face was pale. He was defending all the time, being edged back toward the circle. Rotwell sensed his chance. With two mighty swipes he knocked Lockwood backward, close to the weakened chains. The Visitors within sensed his proximity; they thronged at the boundary in ever greater numbers, pale hands reaching, mouths agape. The psychic roaring from the circle increased. I could see the broken chains stir slightly as a force pushed on them from inside.
Lockwood still had his rapier up. He parried, he dodged, but his normal energy and control had gone. The next moment, the sword was gone, too. Rotwell had contemptuously struck it away. Lockwood jumped back. He stood at bay in front of the iron circle, thin, pale, helpless—and still defiant. He stared at his enemy with blazing eyes.
“In a minute,” Steve Rotwell said, “I’m going to kill your friends. But the first honor goes to you.” He lifted his rapier.
And that was when I arrived.
Yes, Rotwell had his sword arm raised, but he was also stooping slightly, back bent, bottom out. In every respect, he presented an excellent target. I swung my boot in and around like a soccer player zeroing in on a goal.
It was a terrific kick, if I do say so myself. I connected well. Rotwell shot forward, straight at Lockwood, who flung himself to the side. Rotwell toppled right across the iron chains and lay sprawled on top of them, one arm lost in the haze beyond. He blinked; he grimaced. He gave a deep-throated cry of fear. He tried to rise. But ice was already crusting over his back; it grew out in thin fingers across the surface of his hair. With a mighty effort he got to his knees—you could see the sinews straining in his neck. But something prevented him from going farther. The gray shapes were congregating close. Something was tugging on the arm inside the circle. It jerked him inward, once, then twice. Both times, he succeeded in pulling himself away. But his strength was gone. Ice extended over his forehead, crested his cheekbones, ran down his chiseled jaw.
It was all over for Steve Rotwell. He made a last effort, cried out a final time…
And was sucked inside the circle. It happened so fast, so silently, so weightlessly, it was like he’d been inhaled. One moment he crouched there, a bulky man, encased in spreading ice; the next, the chains were completely empty. Steve Rotwell, chairman of the Rotwell Agency, was gone.
The gray shapes swirled in triumph. The chains shivered—the broken links moved across the ground. Something inside had struck against them with considerable force. They would not hold for long.
Lockwood got unsteadily to his feet; he picked up his sword. White-faced, he grabbed my hand, hurried us toward the others. “George.”
“What?”
“We’ve got to destroy the circle. That monster flare of yours. Now might be just the time for it.”
“What? Big Brenda?”
“You’ve given it a name?”
“I’ve grown kind of attached to her.” George pulled the silver coconut from his belt and hefted it in his hand. “Oh, very well. Want me to throw it?”
“No! I mean—why not give it to Lucy? She’s closer. No—just pass it to her. Don’t throw.”
George gave it to me. I was surprised by how heavy it was. “It’s got a timer switch, here, Luce,” he said. “What do you think? Set it to two minutes?”
I looked at the broken circle, at the mess of forms that pressed against the ruptured links of chain. There was Emma Marchment’s ghost, hollow-eyed and red of mouth; there Solomon Guppy’s swollen form. There too, I thought, half-hidden in the broiling mist, was something in a bright blue dress I recognized far too well. Very soon the links would break and the circle would open, and these spirits would spill out into the world.
I turned the dial and flicked the switch. �
��I think one minute would be about right,” I said. “How fast can we all run?”
It turned out that the answer was “just fast enough.” The primary explosion happened just about the time we reached the boundary fence and were heading out into the field. It was big enough to take the roof off the building behind us, and send us all tumbling, head over heels, across the grass. For an instant, night became day; you could see all the subtle greens and yellows of every weed and grass blade picked out in 3-D detail. Then the first bits of metal began raining down around us, and any interest in botany was over.
We kept on running. A few minutes later, we reached the comparative safety of the hillside. We collapsed at the top of the slope, beneath the birch trees, watching the institute facility burn.
When he’d gotten his breath back, Lockwood looked over at where George, Kipps, and Holly were sprawled in various attitudes of exhaustion. “Thank you for saving us,” he said. “Lucy and I have never been so pleased to see anyone. We thought you’d all gone home.”
“We nearly had,” Holly said.
George nodded. “After you left us in the weapons room, we had an argument about what we should do. Kipps was all for leaving, like you ordered. But I couldn’t do it. I wanted to go after you, and Holly backed me up. So then Kipps said that if he was going to jump off a cliff he’d do it with a gun in his hand, and he started loading us up with all the weapons we could carry. We were delayed by those two scientists coming through again, but we followed pretty quickly after that. You should have seen the three of us, marching down that corridor, armed to the teeth.” He gave a chuckle. “Anyway, when we got to that big room, we slipped in behind the crates, and then things got really bad for us, because we were just in time to see you head into the circle.”
“So it was you we heard?” My jaw dropped. “Lockwood and I thought you were more Rotwell agents on the way! That’s why we ended up going inside!”
“Ah, well,” George said, “sorry about that. But you can’t blame us for coming back, can you? Anyway, seeing you disappearing in among the ghosts…That stunned us. Spirit-capes or no spirit-capes, we thought you were dead. And a moment later Rotwell and his gang all trooped back in, and that guy was there in his stupid armor, marching up the chain, ready to go inside.”
“You were looking at the Creeping Shadow,” I said. “No, don’t ask. We’ve a lot to tell you, but we can do it later. So what happened next?”
“What happened,” Kipps said from the grass, “was that George went mad.”
George took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I didn’t know that bloke was the Shadow,” he said, “but I knew full well what that circle was. And I thought you’d died there. So my numbness went away and I just felt…angry. Next thing I knew, I was setting fire to a perfectly good research facility.” He gave a heavy sigh. “Hey, ho, that’s how things go. It worked out all right in the end.”
“I guess that’s one way of putting it,” Lockwood said. The inferno had spread along the covered passageways and now reached the weapons room, with its stockpiles of flares and bombs.
“Well, we thought you were dead, didn’t we?” George said. “We were upset.”
Just then there was a colossal multi-plumed explosion. The remaining buildings of the Rotwell Institute facility vanished, to be replaced by successive pluming cauliflowers of white fire.
“Lucy,” Lockwood said, “next time we’re at home and George wants the last biscuit, remind me to let him have it.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” I said, “he can have the whole barrel.”
We sat on the slope, the five of us, watching the destruction. Beyond the far hills, the first signs of dawn stained the eastern sky. Pretty soon, ash began glittering in the fields like frost.
For more than a thousand years, probably ever since the last raven had finished picking at the skeletons left by the Vikings and the Saxons on their ancient battleground, Aldbury Castle had been a backwater, forgotten and ignored. Centuries of action and incident had passed it by. Even its recent epidemic of ghosts had earned it no attention. Yet the “Rotwell Incident” (which was how the newspapers subsequently named the disaster at the institute facility) changed all that overnight. At a stroke it became the most famous location in England.
The response started early. At eight thirty a.m., roughly three hours after explosions had lit up the sky behind the hills, and with the column of black smoke still funneling up above the trees, the first vehicles began rolling through the village. And they didn’t stop coming. All that day a convoy of cars, trucks, and windowless vans, filled to the brim with DEPRAC personnel, Rotwell agents, and armed police, went racing grimly eastward through the woods. Before long, with word spreading and the first journalists arriving on the scene, DEPRAC cordoned off the village altogether. A barrier was erected at the bridge west of the green, and another on the lane, just inside the entrance to the eastern woods. Guards were posted, and no one was allowed in or out.
That suited us fine. We weren’t in shape to go anywhere. We rose late and spent the day in the taproom of the Old Sun Inn, keeping out of sight.
From time to time, word came of activities out on the fields. Members of DEPRAC teams called in for sandwiches and refreshments, and from the tidbits of information they let slip to Danny Skinner and his father, we got a fair idea of what was going on.
Clean-up squads were wading through the wreckage of the Rotwell Institute site. Most of the facility had been destroyed, and what areas remained had been quickly sealed off from all but the most specialized operatives. The ruins of the central building in particular were out of bounds, but it was common knowledge that certain “unauthorized” weapons had been found in neighboring hangars, and that this was the probable cause of the explosion and the fire. Even more sensational was the news that Steve Rotwell himself was missing. He had been at the facility the previous day and had not been located. So far, he was the only presumed casualty. Several surviving scientists, found wandering in the surrounding countryside, had been taken in for questioning.
“And it won’t be long before we’re rounded up, too, I suppose.” This was Kipps, speaking from his seat near the fire. His turtleneck was pulled high, and his face had a bruised and swollen look. All our faces did. We were like a selection of old fruit, dropped too often and left in the bowl to go soft.
Lockwood was playing cards with Holly. He shook his head, an action that made him wince and rub the back of his neck. “I think we’ll be fine,” he said. “What Rotwell was doing in that site counts as major criminal activity—all those secret weapons, for a start, not to mention the ghost-bombs that were used in the carnival assassination attempt last year. And then there’s the iron circle. I’d be very surprised if Johnson and the others talk openly about what happened last night—at least at first. A lot depends on what the fires have actually left behind.”
“I was wondering,” Holly said. “Shouldn’t we tell DEPRAC ourselves?” She had spent even longer than usual in our shared bathroom that morning, and by some magic was almost restored to her pristine self, despite flare burns on her brow and chin. But the gun-toting, wild-haired madwoman of the night before was in there somewhere, I knew. It made me look upon her with fond affection.
“Tell DEPRAC what?” George said. “They clearly have plenty of evidence about what’s been going on.”
“Well, no, I mean about the circle—about the man in armor going through. It’s very important. We’ve got to, haven’t we?”
Lockwood grunted. “Tell old Barnes? I don’t know….We have never been the flavor of the month with him at the best of times. Think he’ll believe us?”
“Probably just clap us in prison,” George said. “Arson, burglary, general assault…Let’s face it, he’d have some tasty options.”
“I think we have to tell him anyhow,” I said. “Holly’s right. It’s just too big a thing to keep quiet about. When we stood in the graveyard that first night, we saw the way the Creeping Sha�
��that armored guy—stirred up the ghosts just by passing by. And then, last night…” My voice trailed off; I shivered, despite the fire. “We did exactly the same ourselves. There are so many implications….”
“Implications that DEPRAC aren’t likely to believe, I fear.” Lockwood put down his hand of cards. “But maybe you’re right. I guess we better had tell Barnes, if we get the opportunity.”
Part of the problem about telling Inspector Barnes, or even talking about events among ourselves, was that what had happened to us was so overwhelming. Lockwood and I in particular found it difficult to talk about our time on the other side of the circle with any clarity. We knew what we thought had happened. We knew that we had crossed over to a place that seemed very like the world we understood, except that it was inhabited not by the living, but by the dead. In that place we were the interlopers, and our presence had roused the inhabitants to action, just like the Creeping Shadow’s had. That much we sort of knew. But coming to terms with even that knowledge was like standing on the edge of a terrible precipice, and trying to take a step forward into space. The step could not easily be taken. The mind simply rebelled.
When, on our return to the inn, Lockwood and I described our experiences to the others, everyone had gone very quiet. Even George had not said much, though his glasses gleamed as he stared long into the fire. “Fascinating,” he said, over and over. “That’s fascinating….This is going to need a lot of thought….”
Holly’s immediate focus had been quite different. “If this is true,” she’d said, sitting alongside us and looking intently at our faces, “what I want to know is how you’re feeling. Do you feel well? Are you both okay?”
“We’re fine,” Lockwood said, laughing. “Don’t worry yourself. The capes did a great job of protecting us, didn’t they, Luce?” And I’d smilingly agreed with him.
The Screaming Staircase Page 32
