Lockwood & Co.: The Creeping Shadow (14 page)

“Lockwood was right,” George said. “This thing’s playing tricks, most of them with sounds.” He looked back along the corridor, gave the watching Kipps a wave. “Don’t you have that foul skull with you? What’s it got to say for itself? It never used to be short of an opinion.”

“Hard to get anything out of it tonight,” I said. “It’s in a grump. It can’t believe I’m working with Lockwood and Co. again.”

“Jealous,” George said. “Acting like a jilted lover. It probably thought it had you all to itself. You’re the only thing that ties it to the living world. Well, we’ve all got our problems. Right, I’m going to put another PEWS in the lounge. You might want to encourage the skull to talk. This place gives me the creeps, and I haven’t the first clue what the Source could be.”

Nor did I. Nor did any of us, and the pressure of that ignorance weighed most heavily on me. Our vigil wore on; and steadily the repertoire of noises I experienced in that house began to multiply. I heard the footsteps several times more, always when I was downstairs, always echoing from the floor above. It was a peculiar, shuffling, slapping step, both abrupt and dragging, the kind that might be made by loose-fitting carpet slippers on a pair of swollen feet. Twice, once when I was in the basement and once in the living room, I heard a snatch of heavy, labored breathing, as if a very large person was struggling to move around. And once, when standing in the hallway, I heard behind me a soft, continuous rasping, as might have been caused by cloth, pressed against misshapen flesh, brushing along the wall. Any one of those would have been enough to unsettle me; taken together, and with none of the others hearing anything, they began to prey on my mind.

As haunted houses went, it was a
noisy
one. I understood why Penelope Fittes had wanted me there.

Penelope Fittes. Not Lockwood. Whenever I thought of that, annoyance speared through me. But these last few months I’d become good at damping down my annoyance in perilous places. And nowhere in this house was as perilous, it seemed to me, as the dowdy wood-and-mustard-colored kitchen. I wanted to survey it properly; connect with what had happened there. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it was the fastest way to get to the heart of the haunting. I would clear my mind, do the job, and go home.

Eleven thirty came; we rendezvoused in the living room again. For everyone else, it had been a quiet couple of hours, with nothing but low-level malaise and creeping fear to disturb their vigil. I recounted my experiences, and Lockwood again questioned me closely, probing to see if I was still calm. Again I reassured him. After that, people swapped roles: George went to the basement, Holly to the first floor. Lockwood would be the roving anchor, connecting everyone during the midnight hour. I returned to the kitchen.

As I entered, I thought I heard the briefest snatch of whistling, followed by the three rapid clicks. Then nothing.

“Skull?” I said. “Did you hear that?”

No answer. I’d had enough of this. The skull had been silent ever since our arrival. I took the jar out of the backpack. The ghost’s face floated in the green ichor. It still wore its haughty expression; as I watched, it slowly but studiedly rotated away from me. I set the jar on the floor beside the chains and walked around it to catch up with the face. “Didn’t you hear?” I demanded. “The phenomena are increasing. What’s your take on them?”

The ghost stopped rotating. It looked blankly left and right, as if suddenly aware of me.
“Oh, you’re talking to
me
now?”

“Yes, I am. There’s something building here, and I sense mortal danger. I’m wondering if you have any perspective on it.”

The ghost adopted an expression of enormous unconcern. Its nostrils dilated; I heard a dismissive sniff.
“Like you care a bean what I think.”

I looked around the moonlit kitchen, silent, seemingly innocuous, but drenched in evil. “Dear old skull. I do care, and I’m asking you as a…as a…”

“I detect hesitation,”
the skull said.
“As a friend?”

I scowled. “Well, no. Obviously not.”

“As a respected colleague, then?”

“Even that would be stretching it. No, I’m asking you as someone who genuinely values your opinion, despite your wicked nature, your vicious temperament, and my better judgment.”

The face regarded me.
“Ooh, okay…I see you’re going for the virtues of simple honesty here, rather than the honeyed words of flattery. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“Well, go boil your backside in a bucket. It’s not good enough. You’re not getting a word of wisdom out of me.”

I gave a cry of rage. “You are
so
huffy! George said you were jealous, and I’m beginning to think he was right.” I bent down and twisted the dial closed.

At that moment I heard a soft bubbling noise. A rattle and a popping. I turned around.

An old black-and-white stove sat in one corner of the kitchen. It was dark; no gas flames had been lit in it for thirty years. Nevertheless, there was something moving on top of it now, something rattling on a dusty burner.

It was a saucepan, a big one. I took a slow step toward it. The pan jerked and shook vigorously; whatever was inside was coming to a boil. Water fizzed and spat; a ring of small bubbles stacked themselves against the greasy rim.

I didn’t want to look, but I
had
to see. I had to see what was cooking in the pan.

I started toward it. Slowly, slowly I crept across the kitchen. The side of the pan shone silver in the moonlight, but the interior was black. Something roundish sat there; the bubbles crowned and cradled it. There was a rich, gamey scent, carried on hot, wet air.

Closer, closer.
Rattle
,
rattle
went the pan. I unclipped my flashlight from my belt, and lifted it toward the burner….

“Lucy!”

“Ah!” Next thing—me spinning around, flashlight turning on in Lockwood’s face. He gasped and held up his arm, blocking the light with his cuff.

“What are you doing, Luce? Put out that light.”

“What am
I
doing? Don’t you see the—” I turned, raised the flashlight, shone the beam hard across the space. But the stovetop was empty. The pan was gone, and the air was clear and quiet. Moonlight shone through the window. I switched off the flashlight, stowed it away.

Lockwood had moved between me and the stove. “What did you see?”

“Something cooking,” I said. “Something cooking on the stove. It’s gone now,” I added, needlessly.

He pushed his hair back and frowned at me. “I saw your face—you were mesmerized by it. It had snared you. It was drawing you in.”

“I wasn’t snared at all. I just wanted to see—”

“Exactly. I’ve seen you look like that before. All the phenomena are concentrated on you, Lucy. No one else is getting anything. I’m worried. Maybe we should call this off.”

I stared at him, feeling a surge of irritation. “That’s why I’m here, Lockwood,” I said. “I sense things; I draw them out. You have to trust me, that’s all.”

“Of course I trust you.” He held my gaze. “It still concerns me.”

“Well, it needn’t.” I looked away. There on the butcher-block table was George’s bell, sparkling in the moonlight. It was a useless object. We’d had a visitation a few feet away, and it hadn’t done a thing. “I can cope with all that,” I said. “As you should know.
If
you actually want me here.”

There was a pause. “Of course I do,” Lockwood said. “I asked you, didn’t I?”

“Yes,
you
asked me. But it was Penelope Fittes who asked
for
me, and that’s the difference.”

“Lucy, what on earth are you—?” Lockwood said, and in the next instant he whirled around: the door to the hall had crashed open.

“George!”

He careered forward, glasses crooked, eyes wild. “Lucy, Lockwood, quick, come and look! Here, the basement.”

We pushed past him, into the hall, where the entrance to the basement gaped wide. Lockwood shone his flashlight down the steep flight. The light made a yellow oval on the concrete floor. “What is it? Where?”

“Bones! Bones and—and bits and pieces. All lying in a muddle at the bottom of the stairs!”

We stared down at the concrete, rough and bare and blank. “Where?”

George gestured wildly. “Well, of course they’re gone
now
, aren’t they? Too much to hope that they’d stay put while I was getting you!”

“Maybe they’re not gone,” I said. “Lockwood, your Sight’s best of all. If you go down—”

A shrill cry echoed through the house. That was Holly. Lockwood, George, and I took one look at each other and ran back through the kitchen into the little dining room. There stood Holly, elegantly distraught, staring at a blank space in front of the window.

We had our rapiers ready. “Solomon Guppy?”

She shook her head, face pale in the moonlight. “No.”

“Well, what did you see?”

“Nothing, just a table. But on it—”

“Yes?”

“It was too dark to make out. Plates, cutlery.” She shuddered. “Some kind of
roast.
”

“Oh, yuck,” George said. “And I think I just saw the off-cuts in the basement.”

“You want to know the worst of it?” Holly’s voice was faint; she cleared her throat and spoke more calmly. “There was this little white napkin, neatly folded beside the plate. I don’t know why, but that detail…it really got to me. The whole thing was just a snapshot. Lasted a fraction of a second, then it was gone.”

“The problem with all these snapshots,” George said fiercely, “is there’s nothing to stick a sword into. There’s no clue to where the Source could—Lucy?” I’d gone rigid. “Luce? What is it? You hear him again?”

They stood beside me, the three of them in the darkness of the dining room, waiting for my word. “Not exactly
him
,” I said slowly, “but…yes. Yes, I do.”

From the shadows had come the creak of settling wood. Someone heavy easing their weight into a chair.

“Is he
in
here?” George whispered.

I shook my head. “It’s just sounds, echoes from the past….” All the same, my heart was beating fast; my head felt light and my limbs heavy. Fear pressed in on us. Now I could hear a familiar sound, very polite and delicate. The sound of knife and fork on china. “I think I hear him eating.”

Someone coughed in the dark. Someone smacked their lips.

“Can we go out for a minute?” I said. “I need to get some air.”

“Agreed,” Lockwood said. “It’s hot in here, isn’t it?

No one was eager to stay. We hurried to the door, all four of us. As we did so, an appalling scream echoed through the house, filled with both pain and terror. It was the scream of a murdered man, or someone terrified to death. Somebody clutched my arm; I don’t know if it was George or Holly.

“Oh no…” I said. “Kipps…”

Lockwood was out of the room in a flash, long coat swirling behind him. “Holly—you wait here. Lucy—”

“Stuff that. I’m coming with you.”

Through the kitchen we ran, Lockwood, George, and I. Along the hall, past the basement door, around to the foot of the stairs. The house was deathly still. Up the steps, three at a time, and onto the landing—

Where Kipps was still sitting placidly in his iron circle, reading a novel by the light of his ring of candles. He had a packet of biscuits open by one knee, and a flask of coffee by the other. His head was resting on one hand; he wore a look of boredom, which changed to puzzlement as we careered to a halt above him.

“What do you idiots want now?”

He hadn’t heard a thing.

I
t was cold out on the front porch, and there was a thin rain falling in the London night. You could hear it pattering on the hedges and on the concrete drive, and dripping from a broken gutter. Otherwise the city was quiet; we were in the dead hours, and nothing living was abroad. Cold, rain, and silence: that was a combo that suited us all right then. We needed to calm down.

One of the dangers of spending too much time in a haunted house is that you begin to follow its patterns and its rules. Since the rules inside the building are invariably warped and twisted, you find yourself slowly losing contact with the principles that keep you safe. We’d fallen into this trap in the Guppy house, separating too easily, becoming prey to individual psychic attacks. Holly, George, and I had all been affected; our nerves were on edge, and we huddled in silence by the porch lantern, munching chocolate and staring out into the dark. Lockwood and Kipps had so far not been directly targeted, Kipps either because he had rarely strayed from his iron circle, or because he no longer had the sensitivity to pick up on subtle manifestations. As for Lockwood, perhaps he was less vulnerable, and the entity had sensed his strength—it was hard to say.

Certainly he seemed relaxed enough now. “There you go, Luce,” he said, catching my eye. “Aren’t you pleased you came out with us tonight? No one can say that Lockwood and Company doesn’t show you a good time.”

I took a swig from my thermos. The night air was doing its job. My head felt clearer now. “Best evening out I’ve had in ages,” I said. “Random body parts and mortal fear? That’s better than Indian food.”