Lockwood & Co.: The Creeping Shadow (38 page)

Kipps slapped the work table in frustration. “So what do you suggest? Keep strolling around in here until Rotwell finds us and stuffs one of these ghost-bombs up our nose?”

“The only place I want to stroll,” Lockwood said, “is that central building. We’ve
got
to see the main event. That’s where it is—through there.” Eyes shining, he jerked his thumb toward the opening in the sidewall. You could see the ribbed interior of one of the makeshift canvas passageways stretching away, lit by dim lighting.

“Yeah, it’s there,” Kipps said, “and so are all the Rotwell crew. It’s suicide to try it. We’ve done what we can.” He looked around at us. “Am I
really
the only one who thinks so?”

No one answered. We were loyal enough to Lockwood not to want to stand against him. Even so, the logic of Kipps’s argument couldn’t be denied.

“Let me make it even easier.” Kipps plucked one of the batons from the pile. “We take one of these babies with us. We keep it as proof of what we’ve seen. We hold it under Barnes’s mustache so even
he
can’t deny the evidence of his eyes. That’ll get the DEPRAC vans rolling out of London fast enough, I can tell you.”

Lockwood shook his head. “No. We can’t miss this opportunity. The stakes are too high. These batons are
nothing
compared to what’s down that passage. You know it, and I know it. And we’re wasting time—”

“What
I
know,” Kipps interrupted, “is that you’re putting your own curiosity over the safety of your team! Risk your own skin if you must, but—Holly’s? Lucy’s? Do you
want
any other deaths connected to your name?”

It seemed for a moment that Kipps had gone too far. Beneath the makeup, Lockwood’s face was swept clean of expression. He took a step in Kipps’s direction; then the emotional safety-switch went off inside him and he regained control.

“No, you’re quite right,” Lockwood said softly. “I won’t deny it. I’ve not been thinking straight.” He took a breath. “Okay, this is what we’ll do. The rest of you are going to leave. Take the baton, go to DEPRAC, do what Kipps says. He’s right; we’ve got to make sure word gets out. Me, I’m going to have a look in that central building. Shut up, George—don’t argue. If they catch me, I’ll provide enough of a distraction to ensure you get away. That’s all. Get going now.”

It would have been a significant test of his leadership, that moment, with Holly, George, and me all opening our mouths to challenge his decision. But as we did so, we heard a distant
clang
, and a burst of psychic energy wafted down the passage at our backs, strong enough to make the hairs rise on my arms. And with it came voices, footsteps hurrying toward us.

There’s nothing like imminent disaster for putting an end to bickering. We scattered. Lockwood ran low, rolled across an aisle, came to a halt in a crouch at the far end of a table. Kipps and Holly vanished; George skidded past me in the opposite direction. I threw myself under the nearest table, wriggled between boxes, and kept on crawling as two sets of boots entered the room and went by. I looked back. Between the metal table legs I saw a man and a woman, both middle-aged, both with thick spectacles pushed up on their heads. They wore white lab coats, emblazoned with the rearing lion.

“How long now?” the woman said as they walked up the aisle.

“Ten minutes at the most. He’s been away twenty. It’s never more than half an hour.”

“Better do this quick and get back, then.”

Their footsteps continued to the partition door; they went through into the lab.

Something made me turn. There was Lockwood at the end of the table. He was crouching opposite me. His hair was tousled, his face smudged with makeup, but his eyes and smile were very bright. He met my gaze, waved a swift good-bye.

Then he was away, keeping low, ducking through the arch and up the passage.

I looked back into the room and caught sight of Holly, squeezed flat under the farthest table. Kipps was nearby, sandwiched between two racks of salt-spray guns. And, in the far corner, it was either the world’s biggest salt-bomb or George’s bottom poking out from behind a crate of magnesium flares. As I watched, his spectacled face rose up into view and blinked across at me.

They’d be all right.

You know what I’m about to say. It was another of
those
occasions. Those big/not thought-through/spur-of-the-moment/more-intuition-than-rational-analysis occasions.

The occasions that make us who we are.

I too got up and ran out of the room and into the passage.

The wind had picked up outside; the canvas walls were cracking and fluttering against the metal ribs of the tube. Weak bulbs hung from the roof. The passage was one long curve, smelling of salt and iron. It led me swiftly to the center of the site.

At its end was a swinging door, made of solid iron. A psychic barrier, like the one to Jessica’s room at Portland Row. Lockwood was crouching there, rapier gleaming at his belt, clearly about to peep through. I fell into place beside him.

He started, cursed, rewarded me with a scowl. “What do you think you’re doing? I told you to go.”

“You forget,” I said. “I’m not part of Lockwood and Co. I don’t
have
to take your orders, do I? Anyway, you operate in a certain way, and so do I. You should know that by now.” I flashed him a Carlyle grin.

“Oh, God. Yes, I suppose I should.” He shrugged, then smiled; his excitement was too great to be sidelined any longer. He turned his attention to the door. “Well, I can’t see what’s in here, so we’re going to have to chance it. Get your rapier ready.”

But luck was with us, because when we pushed the door open a crack, gasping at the sudden psychic force, we saw no supernatural terrors or Rotwell agents; just the backs of many wooden crates, open, empty, stacked in piles. The floor was heaped with salt and iron filings, spilling out of the crates. Above soared a great high roof, glowing with pale light.

We’d arrived. The buzzing in my head that had bothered me since first stepping out of the inn that evening now reached its zenith. The din made me woozy; for a second I had to steady myself against the wall. Then Lockwood eased the door wider. Stepping through, we worked our way swiftly through the maze of crates until we came to the final stacks.

There was a narrow cleft between them. Beyond was brightness, movement, an enormous space.

We stood behind those crates, and looked.

“Oh my,” was all I said.

From somewhere, Lockwood had produced the pair of black sunglasses that he only used for the brightest death-glows, the fiercest supernatural light. He flicked the frames open, one-two, in a hard, sharp action, like the double drawing of a knife blade. He was exultant; the remorseless drive and determination that Kipps had criticized, that Rotwell had understood, that had swept me up since I first met him, shone fulfilled in Lockwood’s face that moment. It had led him to this.

“There it is,” he said. “That’s what we’ve been after, all along.”

Laughing softly, he put the glasses on.

How to describe what we saw in that cavernous warehouse at the heart of the institute? It’s hard, because even at the time the
exact
contents—what was and wasn’t there—were oddly hard to fathom. For a start, the space was mostly empty; except for our end, where all the crates had been shoved, there was very little in it at all. Metal walls towered over us; soft lamps clung to the soaring roof. It was like being in the skeleton of a great church, looking down the abandoned center aisle. A passage similar to the one we’d come through opened off along the right-hand wall. At the far end, dimly, I saw the double doors we’d spotted from outside, open to the night. I say
dimly
, for despite the place’s emptiness, something in the very center made them difficult to see.

Where
we
stood, the ground had been lined with a raised platform of wooden boards, but most of the building had no floor, just bare black earth. The grass that had grown there had long since died; the surface was hard soil, scattered with bones. This place had been the heart of the ancient battle; that was why it had been chosen. It gave the institute a head start with what they planned to do.

An immense circle of iron chains had been placed in the middle of the earth floor. It was wider than any circle I’d ever seen, maybe thirteen feet in diameter. And the chains themselves were vast; they were like the ones you saw at the London docks mooring ships to the harbor posts. They must have weighed a ton.

The
reason
for all this iron was instantly apparent. Inside the circle were Visitors.

Many of them.

Perhaps because of the restrictive power of the chains, they manifested only as pale gray shapes, superimposed upon each other and moving from side to side, like schools of fish in an undersized tank. Faint as they were, I could tell they weren’t Shades or Lurkers or other feeble Type Ones. These were forceful spirits. It was their collective energies that I’d felt all the way back in Aldbury Castle.

Their Sources had been piled up inside the circle. You could just see them, lying on the ground below the restless, drifting forms. I knew at once that these were the objects looted from the furnaces, taken from the relic-men, purchased and stolen and gathered across London. They had been removed from their protective jars and cases and placed inside the chains, to create a single Source of monstrous power.

The skull had to be somewhere in there, but I couldn’t spot it. Everything inside the circle was curiously hazy, as if light lost traction the moment it crossed the chains. The effect was almost like a thick column of mist blocking the center of the hangar, but that was too definite. It was more like a dullness of vision. You felt like you wanted to rub your eyes every time you looked at it. Mainly you just wanted to look away.

“What have those idiots
done
?” I murmured. “What’s it all
for
?”

Lockwood nudged my arm. “Look at the chain, Luce. It’s all about the iron chain.”

Not far from the end of our wooden platform, a metal post had been hammered into the earth. Attached to it, at about (I guessed) the height of my shoulder, was a length of medium-weight iron chain. This chain stretched away from the post, maintaining the same height, passed across the boundary of the iron circle, and went between the piles of Sources. What happened to it after that was curiously hard to see, owing to the peculiar light in the center of the room. It must have been connected to something, but
what
that was, or
where
it was, I couldn’t tell. The iron of this chain kept the Visitors in the circle at bay; the air around it, hazy as it was, was free of them.

The chain must have been of great significance, because the men and women of the Rotwell Institute who were present—I counted twelve in total—all stood near the metal post. Some had clipboards, and were dressed like the man and woman who had passed us in the weapons room; others wore thicker suits of protective gear, with plastic hats and oversized gloves. Among them was bland-faced Mr. Johnson (
his
clipboard much in evidence) fussing around, checking their data, looking repeatedly at a stopwatch in his hand. There, too, was Steve Rotwell, decked out like the rest with hat and coat, but recognizable by his bulk, his glittering rapier, and his shiny shoes.
He
stood apart, drinking from a silver flask.

All of them just standing, waiting for something.

Lockwood spoke in my ear. “Someone’s in the circle.”

“You see him?”

“No. The light’s weird. But the chain provides a safe way in.” He bit his lip. “Well, safe-
ish
. Well, not that safe at all, actually. Whoever it is must be wearing some kind of protective gear.”

“What’s he doing in there?”

“We’ll find out. You heard what that pair said back there. It’ll be any minute now.”

As if in confirmation, the door from the weapons room clanged behind us; we saw the man and woman who had passed us hurrying back down to join their colleagues at the chain. The next moment, Mr. Johnson’s stopwatch had started ringing. The tinny sound made me jump. Johnson silenced it. Everyone watched the chain.

Nothing happened.

Steve Rotwell took another sip from his flask.

The iron chain gave a twitch.

As if jolted to life by an electric current, the Rotwell crew sprang into action. Men picked up spray guns, hoisted cylinders onto their backs; they stood in a broad semicircle around the metal post.

The chain was twitching furiously now. Within the circle the ghosts grew agitated, flitting chaotically to and fro. All at once they drew back, away from the chain.

Into the empty haze at the middle of the circle appeared a lurching shadow—faint at first, then darkening. It grew bigger and bigger. It had a creeping, rolling gait; a monstrous body; around its vast and shapeless head snapped leaping flames. Closer and closer it came, hand over hand, and the psychic hum from the circle suddenly cut out. In absolute silence the shape reached the barrier of iron. It did not hesitate.

Lockwood gasped; I cried out. One instant it was not there. Then the Creeping Shadow stepped straight over the chains with a sudden roar of noise and fire.