Lockwood & Co.: The Creeping Shadow (21 page)

We sat there. For a minute or two, no one said anything.

“George,” Lockwood said, “how many cases have we currently got?”

“A few. Hol will know how many. And there’s a possible new client coming to see us this morning. You remember, the one from out of town. Which reminds me, we should really get some sleep.”

Lockwood nodded slowly. “Well, Luce, we
could
look into this for you. Not just for the skull’s sake, though I see that it’s important. As far as I’m concerned, it would be because of what those men tried to do to you.” He took a bite of waffle. “But, technically speaking, that would make you our client rather than our colleague. Would you be okay with that?”

He had that look that I knew so well: a kind of shining, as if the spark of adventure had been ignited within him. George was shaking his head and huffing mightily, but I saw the electricity in his eyes, too. It was strange: as a client, as someone firmly in their debt, things felt easier between us than they had since the day I’d left.

“I’m okay with that,” I said, and I meant it. “Thank you, Lockwood. Thank you, George. And…and if we’re talking about payment…”

Lockwood raised a hand. “We’re not. Good. That’s settled, then. Now, if you can remember your way upstairs, we all need to get to bed.”

M
y sleep that morning was as deep as death; and, on waking, I experienced complete disorientation. Surfacing like a free diver who had stayed below too long, I found myself staring at the sunlit beams of my sweet old attic bedroom. I sat up and looked around me, and for those few short moments I was still working at Lockwood & Co. and the events of the last months were nothing more than a twisted, fading dream. Then I noticed some of George’s socks draped like weary snakes over the windowsill, and piles of his garments rising like sinister gravestones at the bottom of the bed, and the world tipped back again.

I took an awkward shower in the tiny bathroom wedged beneath the eaves, keeping my bandaged arm outside the curtain. Then I got dressed. The bright spot here was that I had fresh clothes. Upon opening my door, I’d found a neat arrangement of folded items waiting on the landing step. They were all mine, things I must have left behind in my rush to leave four months before. Someone—Holly, I supposed—had washed and ironed them in the meantime. I took them in and sorted through. In the end I had to wear the same skirt, but the rest was clean, which made me feel much more presentable.

My body seemed light, strange and bloodless, as if I were recovering from a fever. Moving slowly, I went down to the second floor landing. The walls were still decorated with odd items of bone, shell, and feather: the ghost-catchers and other Eastern curios brought back to England by Lockwood’s vanished parents many years before. And there, closed as ever, was the door to Lockwood’s sister’s room, the place where she’d died. In short, everything was as it always had been—but it was as if I were seeing it for the first time. Forbidden rooms, unhappy memories…How close the past was in this house, how tightly it ringed poor Lockwood.

Voices were coming from the living room below. It was mid-morning; the client meeting they’d mentioned must be in progress. I would not disturb them. I slipped downstairs and sneaked toward the kitchen.

There’s a particular creaky floorboard near the foot of the stairs. A man had once died on that spot, and George claimed the noise (which he swore had only started after the death) was an example of an ultra-low-level haunting. Me, I thought it was just a creaky floorboard. Either way, I stepped on it as I went by.

The living room door was slightly ajar. At the sound, the voices stopped.

“Is that you, Lucy?” Lockwood called. “Come on in and join us! We’ve got cake.”

Slightly reluctantly, I poked my head into the room. There they were, lit by diagonal shafts of sunlight—Lockwood and George, sitting by the coffee table, plus Holly, plus a kid I didn’t know. There was a splendid checkerboard cake on the table, frosted with sugar, as pink and yellow as a cubist dawn. They were doing the client-welcome thing. Holly was in the process of pouring tea.

George glanced up. “Look,
another
of our clients! Got them coming out of our ears today. Check under the sofa! There’s probably more hiding behind the curtains.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you all. Hi, Holly.”

Holly had quit pouring and was gazing at me with evident concern. In the old days I’d have bristled at her attention, suspecting it of being patronizing and insincere. Now it didn’t really bother me; I was even glad of it, in a way. “Lucy,” she said, “I’m
so
pleased you’re all right.” She frowned. “What have they done to your poor arm?”

“Oh, don’t worry. It’s just a graze.”

“I’m talking about the bandages. That’s simply the most incompetent bit of first aid I’ve ever seen. Lockwood, George—
how
much dressing did you use? I’m surprised Lucy could fit it through the door.”

Lockwood looked hurt. “It was a pretty decent effort for two a.m. We thought it was better to be safe than sorry—we didn’t want to find random bits of her lying about the house when we got up this morning. Maybe you can fix it later. Lucy, you’re just in time. Come and sit down. This is Danny Skinner. He’s come for our advice.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But listen, I’m good. I don’t want to butt in. I’ll see you when you’re done.”

“No, we could do with your wisdom.” He grinned. “As long as you don’t charge us for your time. Holly, more tea. George, another slice of cake. Then we can get started.”

Well, what was I going to do otherwise? Sit in the kitchen by my lonesome, staring at George’s map for an hour? And that cake
did
look good—better than a burger or Thai noodles, which is what I usually had for breakfast. So it was only with a minor hesitation that I drifted in, took up position in my old, familiar seat, and had my first real look at Lockwood & Co.’s second client that morning.

From the first there was one particular thing that made him stand out. It wasn’t his disheveled appearance, his muddied, tattered clothes, or even the rat-a-tat trail of ectoplasm burns that ran across his coat like a frozen burst of gunfire. It wasn’t the way he sat bolt upright, either, his eyes blank orbs filled with remembered horror, agitatedly rubbing the swollen knuckles of his left hand. We got stuff like that every day of the week. It wasn’t even the lucid manner in which he spoke, spelling out the horrors inflicted on his community. No, it was none of those things that made us sit up and take notice.

So what did? His age. Or lack of it.

Danny Skinner wasn’t an adult. Like I say, he was a kid. About ten years old.

That
was unusual.

Children see ghosts. Adults complain about them
. As George once pointed out, there are several almost immutable rules surrounding the Problem, and this (George’s Third Law) is one of the most obvious. As psychic detection agents we get plenty of witness statements from children, but it’s the grown-ups who actually come knocking on our door. They’ve got the financial firepower to hire us; plus, the kids are usually too busy out working (and dying) as Sensitives, members of the night watch, or even as agents themselves to ask someone else to help them out.

But here this kid was. Sitting on our sofa. Alone.

Or not exactly alone. He soon had Holly on one side, plying him with tea, and George on the other, offering him a hefty chunk of cake. If there’d been room, I probably would have been on him as well, plumping up his cushions or massaging his toes or something. There was a quality about him—fragile, but at the same time steely and undaunted—that managed to awaken your sense of pity without irritating you at the same time. In a world where no kid can really
afford
to be helpless, where most of us risk our lives as a matter of course, that was quite a hard balance to achieve.

He had the gaunt waif thing going on, that was the main reason for our sympathy: pale skin, unhealthily big eyes, and a pair of ears that would have carried him some distance in a strong wind. His light brown hair was untidily cropped. His Irish sweater looked several sizes too big for him; his head and neck protruded from it like a stork chick peering from a nest. It was all very disarming. Take it from me, if you had to choose between him and a basketful of supercute puppies to toss out of a sinking hot-air balloon, it would have been the pups sent spiraling down to earth.

George and Holly drew back; the kid, now heavily laden with tea and cake, blinked around at us.

Lockwood flourished a hand encouragingly. “Well…er, Mr. Skinner,” he said. “I’m Anthony Lockwood; these are my friends. What can we do for you?”

Danny Skinner’s voice was unexpectedly strong and deep. “You got my message, sir?”

“I did. Something about a”—Lockwood consulted a crumpled letter—“a cursed village, I understand?”

“That’s right. Aldbury Castle. I was hoping you might come take a look at it.”

“Aldbury Castle is the name of the village? I see. Where
is
Aldbury Castle?”

“Hampshire, sir. Hour’s train ride south-west from Waterloo, and then a mile east along Aldbury Way. There’s a Southampton train going at one thirty, so if you shift your backsides, we can just catch it.” The boy made an adjustment to his dirty, tattered coat. “Don’t worry, you won’t have to sleep under a hedge. The Old Sun Inn still has a few habitable rooms.”

Lockwood opened his mouth and shut it again. He cleared his throat. “Um, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, Mr. Skinner. We haven’t accepted the commission yet, or even discussed it.”

“Oh, you’re sure to want this case when you hear about it,” the boy said. He took a loud sip of tea. “I’m just trying to save you time. I could always fill you in on the train.”

“Tell you what,” George said, “perhaps you can fill us in now. What’s the nature of the curse?”

Danny Skinner set down his plates. “Ghosts, spirits, and whatnot. We have a lot of them.”

Lockwood leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Forgive me, but the whole country suffers from that affliction. What makes Aldbury Castle so special that we have to drop everything and come down now?”

“Our village has it worse than most.” The kid’s shoulders twitched in what might have been a shudder. “There’ve been killings.”

Lockwood’s smile faded. “That’s bad. You’ve had cases of ghost-touch, then?”

“Sixteen this year.”

Lockwood sat back; Holly looked up from her notepad. “What?
Sixteen?
Since January? You’re not serious.”

“Might be seventeen now. Molly Suter was sinking fast when I left this morning. Coming back from seeing her sick sister last night, she was surrounded. They caught her in the fields. The kids arrived with iron sticks, but it was too late. And when I set out first thing this morning”—the boy pointed ruefully at the plasm burns on his coat—“you can see that they nearly got me, too. Even though the sun was up, they were waiting in the woods for me. I only just made the train.”

“
They?
You mean Visitors?”

“Of course.”

“It certainly sounds bad. Tell me, why didn’t an adult come to see us? Your father or your mother?” Lockwood hesitated in sudden doubt. “Or, forgive me, are they—?”

Danny Skinner sniffed; it was a short, sharp, angry sound. “If you’re worried about payment, Pops has money. He’s still above ground, just. He’s not well, though—can’t leave the inn. Mum’s dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Lockwood said.

A shrug of bony shoulders. “The good news is, she hasn’t risen again. So far.”

There was a silence. “Try the cake,” George said. “It’s good.”

“Actually, I’ll pass,” the kid replied. “I’m not a cakey person. But I’m serious about leaving, you know. You need to help us, and there’s only one train we can take.”

Was it just me, or did he seem marginally less cute than he had a few moments before? Stork chicks aren’t usually quite so pushy.

A combination of discomfort and mounting irritation had made Lockwood’s expression darken as well. He flicked an imaginary speck of dust off his knee. “Like I say,” he said, “that’s not going to happen until we’ve had many more details from you. Even then, we’re unlikely to come down today. Tell us about these Visitors. What kind of ghosts does Aldbury Castle have?”

“Depends where you’re looking,” Danny Skinner said. He had a sulky expression; you could see he could barely contain his frustration that we weren’t already out of the door. “There are Specters on the green, and Lurkers by the church. Got a Cold Maiden in the new estate, and that’s just for starters. Where I live—the Old Sun Inn—there’s a ghost that comes knocking on the door at night. I saw it once. Like a tiny glowing child. It’s very small and puny and…it’s evil, I think. Had a nasty, furtive look. Slunk across the flagstones and disappeared.”

“Shining Boy,” Holly said.

The kid shrugged. “Maybe. Best not to go downstairs in the inn after midnight, that’s all I’m saying. The ghosts out in the woods are mostly Phantasms and Wraiths—as far as
I
can tell. I’m not an expert, like you
agents
. See how close they got to touching me? Old dead,
they
are, slain warriors most like. Quiet all these centuries, and now rising from the cornfields. And they’re not the worst things walking in the dark at Aldbury Castle.” He swigged his tea back with an almost violent flourish, and set the cup on its saucer with a
crack
. “Like I say, it’s taking its toll. Half the village is gone. Mostly adults; the ones who can’t see the Visitors coming. Those of us who are young enough to fight are doing our best, but we can’t do it on our own, as I keep telling you.” He glanced ostentatiously at his watch.