Lockwood & Co.: The Creeping Shadow (5 page)

I knew it.

And now, assuming you didn’t count a talking skull, it was justme.

As far as I could judge from reading the papers, my departure from Lockwood & Co. had coincided with a period of great activity for my former colleagues. In particular, their success in locating the Source of the Chelsea Outbreak—a room of skeletons buried deep beneath the Aickmere Brothers department store—had earned them the publicity that their leader had long desired. They were rarely off the front page, with photos of Lockwood particularly in evidence. There he was, with George, standing among the broken masonry of the Mortlake Tomb; there he was, alone, posing beneath the blackened outline that was the only remnant of the St. Albans Ghoul. And there he was, finally, in perhaps my least favorite image of the sequence, receiving the coveted Agency of the Month award at the
Times
offices in London, with the slim and elegant figure of Holly Munro standing picturesquely beside him.

So they’d done well, and I was happy for them. But
I’d
thrived, too. My part in the Aickmere’s department store case had not gone unnoticed, and no sooner had I rented a room and placed a small ad in the Agencies page in the
Times
than I began to acquire customers of my own. To my surprise, from the first, most were other companies. I worked with the Grimble Agency on the Melrose Place Murders, and with Atkins and Armstrong on the Phantom Cat of Cromwell Square. Even the mighty Rotwell Agency had used me several times; and whatever Farnaby might say, I knew that they’d turn to me again.

Yes, I was flourishing.

I was succeeding on my own.

And did I
mind
being on my own? Not really. For the most part, I got along fine.

I kept busy. No one could say I didn’t get out much, or didn’t meet all corners of the community; it was just a pity that most of them were dead. In the past week, for instance, I’d seen a ghost child on a swing; a skeleton bride sitting in a church; a bus conductor floating past without his bus; two squashed workmen; a phantom dog being led up Putney High Street by a vast black shadow; a headless librarian; a suitcase containing three nimbuses, two Glimmers, and a Wisp; a wandering severed hand; and a semi-naked neighbor.

That last one had been alive, by the way. I kind of wish he hadn’t been.

Yeah, the nights were always frantic, packed with incident. It was the days that sometimes felt a little hollow. Particularly at dawn, after just finishing a case, when I walked back through the empty streets, bruised and weary, with the weight of the solitary hours ahead pulling at my insides. I couldn’t even rely on the skull in the jar for a chat; he often dematerialized during the day.
That
was when I really missed the company of others, those moments when I was quietly heading home.

Not that, on this particular night, I
was
going home. Not yet. Thanks to Mr. Farnaby’s sour vindictiveness, I had another place to visit first. I was taking a Source in a silver-glass box to one of the most terrible locations in London, and it wasn’t even a haunted house.

Quite the opposite.

It was the place where ghosts were destroyed.

T
he Greater London Metropolitan Furnaces for the Disposal of Psychic Artifacts—the Fittes furnaces, as they were generally known—were located in the eastern industrial district of Clerkenwell. They had been created by Marissa Fittes, legendary founder of the Fittes Agency, more than forty years previously, when the need for the safe destruction of psychic Sources was becoming clear. In those early days, the furnaces had occupied the site of an old boot factory, sandwiched between a printer’s studio and a hat warehouse. Now they filled two full city blocks in which the furnace halls rose like great brick temples, and a forest of tall, thin chimneys blew ash toward the river and the sea. That, at any rate, was the idea; as often as not, the wind dropped it on the surrounding districts, peppering people’s coats and hats with gray-black powder. “Clerkenwell snow,” as it was called, was mostly tolerated for being harmless.

High walls, topped with iron spikes, bordered the yards where agency vans pulled in each morning with fresh deliveries of Sources gathered during the night. Originally intended for Fittes operatives alone, the complex had for decades been open to all agencies. It was neutral ground. The fierce rivalry that existed between companies, which on the street could end in shrill disputes and sometimes violence, had no place within these walls. Rapiers were left with aged doormen, and agents’ behavior was closely monitored by grim-faced attendants who threw out anyone creating a disturbance.

If you came on foot, as I did, you passed through the pedestrian entrance on Farringdon Road, depositing your rapier on the way, then crossed a cobbled courtyard where runnels of freshwater provided extra defense against all undead things. After climbing some steps, you pushed aside a silver-glass door, and entered a wide reception chamber decked with lavender and iron. Seven attendants sat here in separate booths, processing each new object brought for destruction. This was the vetting room.

As I walked through the empty waiting area, between the lines of frayed guide ropes, I heard someone calling my name.

“Hey, Lucy! What have you got for me today?”

The attendant in booth four was a thin young man with pale skin, hooded eyes, and large, rather knobbly hands. His name was Harold Mailer. At eighteen, he knew the furnaces as well as anybody, since he had worked there since the age of eight. He had a horse’s laugh and a skittish, nervous manner. He’d taken Sources off my hands several times over the winter. We got along well enough.

I entered the booth and, with some relief, set the silver-glass box on the counter. It was surprising how heavy a mummified head could be. Harold watched me, scratching an ear.

“Looks like you’ve had a busy night.” He turned the box from side to side. “Who’s this fellow?”

“No idea. Eighteenth-century criminal, most likely. Haunted—would you believe—by a witch’s ghost. Think we could toast him fast? I’m bushed.”

Harold Mailer pulled a wad of forms across the desk and selected a pen with an impressively chewed end. “Anything for you, Lucy, anything for you. I’ll need the usual details.”

I gave the time, place, and circumstances of the capture, and handed over the authorization form, signed on behalf of the Rotwell Agency.

Harold had cropped fair hair, freckles, and protruding ears. His eyebrows were remarkably faint; I could only just see him raising them sky-high. “Rotwell’s again? Not old Farnaby’s bunch?”

“Yeah. This really
is
the last time. They’re useless.”

“You should spread your net wider, Lucy.”

“I will.”

“Why don’t you partner with Anthony Lockwood again? I had him in here last week with that Holly girl. They’d just finished that epic job at Camden Lock. I expect you read about it in
True Hauntings
.”

“No. No…didn’t catch that one.”

“A Screaming Spirit, manifesting from a skeleton at the bottom of the lock gate. No one had thought to look there, it being water—but canals aren’t
running
water, are they? They’re stagnant. It was Lockwood who figured it out, of course.”

I pushed hair out of my face. “Yeah, he generally does.”

“He and that girl were still on a high when they came in. Quite exhilarated. Laughing, giggling together…” Harold scratched his nose. He took a rubber stamp, pressed it in red ink, and put the furnaces’ acceptance mark on the paper. “So, all I need now’s a rating for this Visitor, Lucy….Lucy? Are you concentrating? A rating. Number from one to ten.”

“I remember your system. Eight.”

“Where one is weakest, about the level of a Wisp; and ten is strongest, about the level of that Poltergeist you fell afoul of in November. The one that trashed the store.” He grinned at me and did his horse-laugh thing. “An eight? That’s pretty powerful.”

“Yeah.”

“Mm-hm. Oka-a-y. Want to leave it with me?”

“Farnaby wants me to witness the burning.”

“Or you won’t get paid. I know. All right, come around.”

He took the box and flipped up a hatch in the counter. I passed through the back of the booth and went out a swinging door into the concrete and steel corridor that ran around the perimeter of the furnace house. The corridor was busy, as it always was near dawn. Orange-coated attendants pushed cartloads of empty ghost-jars and silver-glass boxes toward the storage depots. Others accompanied brightly jacketed agents to and from the viewing areas. Carts squeaked, people talked; the fabric of Harold Mailer’s jumpsuit crackled softly as he walked. The boom of the fire-gates echoed in my ears and reverberated under my feet. Even so, it was still possible to feel the underlying psychic terror of the place, the frisson that came from the destruction of dozens of Sources every hour.

A giant board at the end of the corridor indicated, by way of green and amber lights, the furnaces that were presently in operation. Harold glanced up and, without breaking stride, halted at Door 13.

“This is me,” he said. He patted the silver-glass box under his arm. “Say good-bye to your little friend, Lucy.”

“Good-bye, head. How long will it take you to get ready?”

“About ten minutes. Make yourself comfortable in the meantime. Toodle-oo.”

He disappeared into the blast room, and I went up to the viewing area. It was basically a big metal box hanging from the roof of the furnace house, like the gondola of an airship. It had a faded green carpet and lots of chairs and sofas scattered around tables, as if it were the kind of place you’d stop to chat with friends. Sometimes it was opened to the public, so they could see how well the authorities were dealing with the Problem. Mostly it was used by agents; we didn’t socialize, but stood in silence at the long bank of windows, looking down into the infernos below.

As always, I glanced along the rows of chairs to see who was there. A few agents, one or two adult supervisors…And, halfway along, who was that silhouetted at the window? Tall, thin…He turned, and I caught a flash of a yellow jacket. Some rangy Tamworth operative. No one I knew.

My stomach cramped. It was probably hunger; it had been a long time since I’d eaten. I approached the window and stood there, arms folded, waiting for Harold to appear.

The furnace house was a vast brick shell filled with blast ovens, each separated by a metal walkway that ran above a network of pipes and flues. There were twenty separate furnaces, in two rows of ten: great silver cylinders with big black numbers painted on the side. Their tops were clear, so you could look down from above and see the raging fires within. Each also had a supply chute, fitted with blast doors at the end, where the Sources were tipped into the chamber. Attendants stood close by, adjusting heat wheels on the furnace sides. As far as the eye could see, blast doors clanged, flames roared high; Sources were shoved in and vanished in a twinkling.

They said that if you stood there on the viewing platform after dark, you could spot a dozen ghosts at once, writhing briefly, blue and green, as the flames engulfed their objects and their ties to this earth were finally snuffed out. Right now it was getting light outside and the ghosts were not visible, but even from a distance I could feel occasional psychic aftershocks. Each was like the moment of silence after a scream.

“This place,”
the skull’s voice said in my head,
“is hell on earth.”

I looked around me; no one was close by. I took off my backpack, placed it on a chair, and loosened the top. There was the faint face looking up at me in its swirling cloud of green. “I thought you were asleep,” I said.

“Asleep? Me? I’m dead, remember.”

“Or departed back to the Other Side, or whatever it is you do.”

“Nope, still in my jar, through no fault of my own. I haven’t been sleeping. I never sleep. It’s one of many things I never do. Like pick my nose, or sigh when I’m dreaming, or break wind while doing my morning jumping jacks, Lucy. The list is long.”

I frowned down at my backpack. “I don’t do any of those things, either.”

“You say that. It’s a small room we live in.”

“How many times do I have to remind you?” I growled. “We’re
not
living in some weird girl-skull roommate situation! I just don’t have enough space to store you anywhere better—like in a moldy tomb, which is all that you deserve.”

“Ooh, cutting,”
the skull said.
“Something’s put you in a bad mood today. I wonder what. Anyway, we were talking about the furnaces. I don’t like them.”

I didn’t either, but I didn’t answer. I’d just seen Harold Mailer far below me, walking out onto the metal walkway beside furnace thirteen. He had on protective headgear and massive gloves, and he was carrying the silver-glass box. He looked up, raised a cheery thumb, and signaled to the attendant at the blast doors. Wheels swiveled; the doors opened. In the center of the furnace, the flames roared up in welcome. Harold placed the box on the blast tray and fiddled with its silver clasp. The lid opened; Harold tipped. Something dark and round rolled out, straight down the chute and into the center of the fire. At once it began to burn in a shower of green-blue sparks.