Lockwood & Co. Book Three: The Hollow Boy (5 page)

“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….”

“Anytime you like,” George said. “No hurry.” His position was looking precarious. He still dangled by one hand, and the fingers of that hand were slipping fast.

Spinning my necklace, I leaped between the coils, feeling them dart aside. I snatched up the rapier as I passed by, skidded under the ladder, and wrenched it bodily forward, dragging its length
below George just as his grip gave way.

He fell—and landed on the middle rungs like a scruffy sack of coal. The ladder bowed; I heard it crack. Well, that was better than him breaking his neck. He’d have made
such
an annoying ghost.

A moment later he’d skittered down the ladder like a fireman down a pole. I tossed him his rapier.

“What’s up there?”

“Dead person. Angry dead person. That’s all you need to know.” Pausing only to adjust his spectacles, he leaped past to attack the coils.

Across the room, Lockwood had brought something out of the bag. “Lucy—I’m going to throw it! Climb up and get ready to catch!” He drew back his hand, then darted aside as
a swiping tentacle narrowly missed his face. A flick of the rapier; the coil was gone. “Here it is!” he called. “It’s coming now.”

Lockwood, of course,
could
throw. I was already moving up the ladder. A small square object came spiraling straight up and over the central beam; down it came, landing right in my hand.
Not even a fumble. Close by, George was slashing with his rapier, watching my back, carving coils asunder. I reached the top of the ladder, where it touched the beam.

And the Source
was
there.

After so many years, it lay with surprising neatness on its secret perch. The cobwebs that fused it to the wood had smoothed out the contours of the bones and buried them under a soft gray
shroud. You could see the remains of old-style clothes—a tweed suit, two brown shoes tilted at an angle—and the bone ridges around the dust-filled sockets of the eyes. Strands of dark
matter—was it hair or matted cobwebs?—ran like water over the lip of the beam. How had it happened? Had he purposefully climbed up there, or been tucked away (more likely) by a
murderer’s careful hand? Now was not the time to worry either way. The dead man’s fury pounded in my mind; below me, in the weaving lantern light, Lockwood and George did battle with
the coils.

In those days the Sunrise Corporation provided silver chain nets in plastic boxes, for ease of use. I cracked the lid open, took out the folded net. I let it slip outward until it had fully
unfurled between my fingers, thin and loose like an uncooked pastry case, like a shimmering skin of stars.

Silver snuffs out Sources. I flicked it up and over the beam, over the bones and cobwebs, as calmly and casually as a chambermaid making a bed.

The net sank down; the fury winked out of my mind. All at once there was a hole there, an echoing silence. The coils froze; a second later they had faded from the attic like mist from a
mountaintop: one moment there, the next gone.

How big the attic seemed without the Changer in it. We stopped dead, right where we were: me sinking down against the ladder, Lockwood and George leaning against the rafters, weary, silent,
rapiers gently smoking.

Smoke twisted from one side of Lockwood’s overcoat. His nose had a residue of silver ash on it. My jacket had burned where the plasm touched it. My hair was a nest of cobwebs. George had
contrived to tear the seat of his trousers on a nail or something.

We were a total mess. We’d been up all night. We smelled of ectoplasm, salt, and fear. We looked at one another, and grinned.

Then we began laughing.

Down by the hatch, in its green glass prison, the ghostly face looked on in sour disapproval. “
Oh, you’re pleased with that fiasco, are you? Typical! I’m ashamed even to be
faintly associated with Lockwood & Co. You three really are
hopeless.”

But that was just it. We
weren’t
hopeless. We were good. We were the best.

And we never fully realized it until it was too late.

BED & BREAKFAST—AND MURDER!

H
ORRIFIC SECRETS OF
W
HITECHAPEL
G
UESTHOUSE
B
ODIES FOUND IN PIT BENEATH GARDEN SHED

“And that’s it,” Lockwood said disgustedly. He lowered the newspaper and sat back into his armchair. “That’s all the
Times
gives us for
our trouble. There’s more about the scuffle in the kitchen than there is about the Changer. Doesn’t exactly focus on the important stuff, does it?”

“It’s the ‘unscathed’ bit that
I
object to,” George said. “That old cow gave me a right old whack. See this horrible red blob?”

I glanced up at him. “I thought your nose always looked like that.”

“No, here, on my forehead. This bruise.”

Lockwood gave an unsympathetic grunt. “Yes, dreadful. What really bothers me is that we only made page seven. No one’s going to notice that. The massive Chelsea outbreak is
dominating the news again. All
our
stuff’s getting lost.”

It was late morning, two days after the Lavender Lodge affair, and we were stretched out in the library of our house in Portland Row, trying to relax. Outside the window a gale was blowing.
Portland Row seemed formed of liquid. Trees flexed; rain pattered on the panes. Inside, it was warm; we had the heating on full-blast.

George was slumped on the sofa beside a giant pile of crumpled ironing, sweat pants akimbo, reading a comic. “It
is
a shame they don’t talk more about the actual
case,” he said. “The way the Changer created its own little cluster of other ghosts was fascinating. It’s how the Problem spreads, some say—strong Visitors causing violent
deaths, which lead to secondary hauntings. I would have
loved
to study it in more detail.”

That was how George always was, once the panic of a case died down. He was
curious
about it: he wanted to understand
why
and
how
it happened. Me, it was the emotional
impact of each adventure that I couldn’t quite shake off.

“I just felt sorry for all those poor ghost-touched men,” I said. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor below the sofa. Officially, I was sorting the mail;
unofficially
,
I’d been having a gentle doze, having been up till three on a Lurker case the night before. “I could feel their sadness,” I went on. “And even that Changer…yes, it was
terrifying, but it was unhappy, too. I could feel its pain. And if I’d had more time to try to connect with it properly—”

“It would have killed you stone dead.” From the depths of his chair Lockwood gave me a look. “Your Talent’s amazing, Luce, but the only ghost you should communicate with
is the skull, because it’s locked up in its jar….And to be honest, I’m not even sure that’s safe.”