Lockwood & Co.: The Creeping Shadow (40 page)

Why did it do that? It bothered me.

And where were the Rotwell people? We’d just heard them coming in. That’s why we were standing there, by an icy chain, surrounded by a host of angry spirits, in the middle of that stupid building.

Try as I might, I couldn’t see—or hear—them at all.

At least that meant they were unlikely to spot us, either.

“The armored man,” I said. “You really think he was the Creeping Shadow we saw in the churchyard?”

Lockwood nodded. “Yes. Though I don’t pretend to understand how, because when we saw him he was see-through, like a spirit. He wasn’t solid, was he? He was hardly there at all. And how does that jibe with him standing in here? We’re miles from Aldbury Castle. I don’t get it.”

I didn’t either.

“Just a few minutes more,” Lockwood said.

We stood there, surrounded by whirling horrors.

All of a sudden I needed to talk to him.

“Lockwood,” I said. “Me leaving.”

“What about it?”

“Really it was all your fault.”

He glanced at me from under his icy hood. “What? How d’you figure that?”

“Because”—I took a deep breath—“because you always risk yourself for me. You always do, don’t you? I realized I put you in danger by being part of the company. Then there was a ghost at Aickmere’s. It showed me the future—it was a future in which you’d died for me. I knew you’d end up killing yourself, and I couldn’t bear that, Lockwood. I just couldn’t bear it. So…” I spoke in a small voice. “I left.
That’s
why I did it. It’s better this way.”

“So it wasn’t because of Holly, then?”

“Ah! Surprisingly,
no
. It was because of you.”

“Okay…” He nodded slowly. “I see.”

I waited. Out in the murk, pale fingers reached for us. Clenching, they jerked away. “Well, aren’t you going to say anything?” I said.

He was looking at his icy gloves. “What is there to say? Maybe you’re right. This way we don’t see each other very often, and perhaps you extend my life. Although, let’s face it”—he glanced out at the circling spirits—“I’m not likely to last long in any case, at the rate I’m going.”

I touched his glove. “We’ll get out of this,” I said.

“Of course we will! But I don’t just mean tonight. Kipps was right about me, and Rotwell was, too, for that matter. I don’t hold back, do I? When I set out to do something, I never take the safest route. Sooner or later, I suppose my luck will run out.” He shrugged. “I’ve always been that way.”

I thought of the abandoned bedroom at Portland Row. “Why
is
that, do you think?”

He hesitated. His eyes met mine, then they slid away. “Don’t look behind you!” he said. “I can see Solomon Guppy’s spirit again. The other phantoms seem to want to avoid him, which shows even the dead have taste….Okay, he’s gone. Listen, thank you for telling me why you left. I should point out that, despite your excellent intentions, you’ve still ended up standing beside me surrounded by a tide of ghosts….”

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t quite know how that happened.”

“I’m not complaining. Far from it. I’m glad you’re here with me. I think you keep me safe, if anything.”

Right then, the cape wasn’t the only thing that kept me warm. I smiled at him.

“And I’d like to say something else,” Lockwood said. “Back at Guppy’s house, you mentioned something about it being Penelope Fittes’s idea that I call on you. Don’t deny it. You did. Well, she may
think
it was her idea, but I’d been looking for an excuse to get you back all winter. I just knew that, unless I had a really good reason, you’d tell me to get lost. And you would have, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.” When I nodded, ice cracked on the back of my hood. “I would have.”

“Fittes gave me the perfect opportunity,” Lockwood continued. “But we’ve moved on from all that. Anyway, I’d just like to add”—he cleared his throat—“that if you ever
did
want to come back to Lockwood and Company—I mean as a proper, permanent colleague, not just as a client, associate, or hanger-on, or whatever it is you are right now—we’d at least have the pleasure of each other’s company for a bit before my untimely end….” He looked at me.

I said nothing. Around us, ghosts screamed and unholy shapes contorted. We gazed at each other.

“Wouldn’t we?”

“I suppose.”

“Think about it.”

“I have….All right.”

“All right what?”

“I’m coming back. If you’ll have me, I mean. If the others will have me, too.”

“Oh, I’m sure they can be persuaded. Though George will have to find somewhere else to store his underwear. Great.” His eyes sparkled. He grinned at me. “We should stand together in a haunted circle more often. Get a few things ironed out….” His head jerked up. “Hold on….”

I’d felt it, too, through the fabric of my gloves. A vibration in the links. The chain jumped again.

We looked at one another. “The Shadow. It’s coming back in,” Lockwood said.

I peered along the chain, through the rushing ghosts. “I don’t see it.”

Lockwood cursed. “I’m not meeting it in here. Heaven knows what would happen. No choice, Luce. We’re going to have to make a dash for it. Let’s nip out the other side, run for those doors. If we’re fast enough, the men there will be caught off guard, and we’ll go straight out into the fields. Happy?”

And you know what? Given the circumstances, I sort of was. “Go, then,” I said. The chain bounced up and down; over my shoulder I saw a bulky shape swimming into view. It loomed beyond the ghosts.
“Go!”

We ran along the chain as fast as we could, and again the capes had their effect—the Visitors parted for us, and we stepped over the circle and back out into the hangar.

“Run!” As Lockwood said it, he was gone, his spirit-cape flying out behind him. It looked as if he were about to take flight. He had his rapier in his hand. I let go of the icy chain—the other post was just ahead—and followed him down that long building, head down, arms pumping, and out through the open doors. No one tried to stop us; we plowed on, over gravel, through the gap left by the missing panel in the fence, and onto the black grass. We kept running, running across the field, but heard no signs of pursuit behind us. At last we slowed down and came to a breathless halt.

For the first time, we looked around us. The field had changed. It was covered with crystals of ice. All around us mists had formed, and the icy ground lay shimmering under a black sky.

I
t was very silent. The wind that had blown across the fields earlier was gone, and the night was bitterly cold. Thick wires and horseshoes of frost lay in the dents and ripples of the hard black earth; the whole land was white with it. A flat brightness lay over the field and the escarpment beyond, and on the dark trees at its top. The source of this brightness was hard to make out. There were no stars in the black sky, and no moon showing. We stood alone in the field, looking back at where we’d been.

“Well, no one seems to be after us,” Lockwood said. His voice sounded small; it didn’t carry well in the freezing air. “That’s good.”

“Were there men at the doors?” I said. I found it hard to speak. “I didn’t see any.”

“No. They must have left. Lucky for us.”

“Yeah. Lucky.”

Looking back, I saw that the floodlights had been turned off. You could see the poles hanging above the roofs like giant insects, bent and dead. The buildings showed like pieces of pale gray paper, stuck onto a dark-gray board. Even the lights in the hangar we’d just run from had been switched off. The institute was bathed in the same subdued, flat, gray glow that lit the field and trees.

“Power cut,” Lockwood said. “Maybe that’s what distracted them.”

The outside of Lockwood’s cape was thick with ice; I could feel the weight of mine hanging on me, too. The insulating qualities of the feathers still worked well, though—I sensed, rather than felt, the grueling cold all around. White threads swirled around us.

“Where’d all this mist come from?” I said. “All this frost? It wasn’t here before.”

“Some effect of their experiments?” Lockwood suggested. “I don’t know.”

“It’s a strange light. Everything’s so flat.”

“Moonlight does odd things,” Lockwood was looking toward the trees.

“Where
is
the moon?”

“Behind the clouds.”

But there were no clouds.

“We’d better get going,” Lockwood said. “The others should be halfway back to the village by now. They’ll be getting help. We should join them, reassure them we’re okay.”

“I don’t understand it.” I was still looking up at the sky.

“We need to catch up with them, Luce.”

Of course we did.

We started walking. Frost cracked underfoot, and our breath hung in the air so that we plunged through it with each step.

“It’s so
cold
,” I said.

“We were lucky they didn’t come after us,” Lockwood said again. He glanced over his shoulder. “Odd, though…I’d have thought
somebody
might come.”

But we were the only moving things in that wide, wide field.

By unspoken agreement we took the lane through the forest. The light was different there, too. The gray haze seemed to penetrate everything. The lane was white as bone. Thin lariats of mist wound in and out of the trees.

“This is weird,” I whispered. “There’s nobody anywhere.”

I’d thought we might see the others ahead of us, but the road was empty, and we could see a good distance in the soft, flat light. We hurried on, following the gradient downhill. We passed the side track to the open quarry, with its little memorial cairn of stones. The flowers that had decorated it were gone, and the photograph at its top was frosted with ice. There was no sound in the gray forest, and no wind. Shimmering crystal flecks fell from the surface of our capes, and our breaths came in brief and painful bursts. Soon we would reach the village. Our friends would be there.

“Maybe there
are
some people about,” Lockwood said softly. Neither of us had spoken for a while. When we did, neither of us wanted to raise our voices; I don’t know why. “I thought I saw someone walking down that side track from the quarry. You know, just beyond the cairn.”

“You want to go back, see who it was?”

“No. No, I think we should just keep going.”

We walked more quickly after that, our boots clicking on the frost-hard road. We crossed the silent forest and came to the wooden footbridge over the little stream.

The stream was gone. The bridge spanned a dark, dry channel of black earth that wound off among the trees. Lockwood shone his flashlight beam on it, the light frail and flickering.

“Lockwood,” I said, “where’s the water?”

He leaned against the railing, as if weary. He shook his head, said nothing.

I could hear my voice cracking with panic. “How can it have just…disappeared? I don’t understand. Have they dammed it suddenly?”

“No. Look at the ground. Bone-dry. There’s never been any water here.”

“But that makes no—”

He pushed himself upright, his hand rasping as it pulled free of the rail. Ice particles glistered on the fingers of his glove. “We’re almost at the village,” he said. “Perhaps there’ll be answers there. Come on.”

But when we came down from the lane, the village had changed, too. Never exactly well-lit, the cottages around the green were now entirely dark. Their shapes merged in the half-light and could scarcely be seen. The green itself was filled with shifting coils of mist. Above us, the church tower blended with the pewter-black sky.

“Why are all the lights off here, too?” I said.

“Not just off,” Lockwood whispered. He pointed. “Look by the church. The ghost-light’s gone.”

It was true. True, and it made no sense. On the little mound beside the church, there was an empty space. The rusty, disused ghost-lamp wasn’t just gone—there was no trace of it ever having been there at all.

I didn’t say anything.
Nothing
made any sense, not since we’d come out of the institute. A creeping, pervading wrongness hung over everything; in the cold, the silence, the soft, pale light, and the terrible, sapping solitude of it all. But it numbed you, too; it was hard to think.

“Where
is
everybody?” I murmured. “
Someone
should be around, surely.”

“It’s after dark—they’re all at home. And George and the others will be safe inside the inn.” Lockwood’s voice didn’t carry any conviction. “We know half the village is deserted, anyway. We shouldn’t expect to see anyone.”

“So we go to the inn?”

“We go to the inn.”

But the inn, when we reached it, was as dark as all the rest. Its sign was blistered with frost. The door swung open to the touch, and a faint stale smell came from the black interior. Neither of us wanted to go inside.

We walked back out onto the green and stood there, wondering what to do. When I looked down, I saw that where my boots protruded beyond frozen drapes of the spirit-cape, the leather and steel caps were white with ice. Our capes were almost solid; they creaked whenever we moved. Then I noticed something else. A thin gray plume of smoke was rising from Lockwood’s cape, drifting away into the dark air. The surface flickered, as if with heatless flames.