Lockwood (28 page)

The secret chamber, which we guessed had been Bickerstaff’s workroom, displayed no other immediate psychic traces once we were all inside. Lockwood set a lantern on the sill beneath the bricked-up window; by its light George wandered round the perimeter, inspecting the wall. There was no other exit. Old gas-lamp fixings, rusty and sagging, extended from the bare plaster. The table in the centre was the only furniture, its steel legs bolted to the floor. Its iron top was rough with dust and plaster fragments. Deep grooves ran along the edges, and opened out into spouts projecting over the floor.

Lockwood ran his finger along one groove. ‘Nice little channels,’ he said, ‘for the flow of blood. This is a purpose-built dissection table. Mid nineteenth century. I’ve seen examples at the Royal College of Surgeons. Looks like it was here that good old Dr Bickerstaff experimented with body parts of the deceased. Pity it’s made of iron, Luce, or you might have got some interesting psychic feedback from it.’

I’d been drinking water from my backpack, and was now chewing furiously on a piece of chocolate. I still felt shaken by my experiences at the door, but my fright had hardened into something stronger. If the presences here wanted to warn me off, they’d have to do better than that. I tossed the chocolate wrapper aside. ‘It was in this room that they used to meet,’ I said. ‘A group of men, smoking and talking about their experiments. I know that much already, but I may get more. So hush up. I want to try something.’

I moved to the far wall, well away from the iron surface of the table. There’d been a fireplace here; the grate was choked with birds’ nests, rubble, fragments of wood and plaster. It seemed to me that this was the heart of the room, where Bickerstaff and his companions would have stood and smoked, discussing whatever lay upon the table. Here, if anywhere, the traces might be strong.

I put my fingertips against the plaster of the wall. Cool, damp, even oily to the touch. I closed my eyes, and lost myself. I listened . . .

Sound welled up from the past. I grasped at it; it fell away.

It’s strange how psychic echoes work. They come and go – first strong, then weak; waxing, then subsiding – like they’re a beating heart or rhythmic pulse, deep in the substance of the house. It makes Touch a tricksy, unreliable Talent. You can try the same spot five times and get nothing; on the sixth, you’re knocked off your feet by the power of the psychic recall. I trailed my hand along the walls, tried the fireplace and the blocked-up window, and the only result was dirt-stained fingertips.

Time went by. I heard Lockwood shuffling his feet, George scratching somewhere unmentionable; otherwise they were silent. I had them both well trained.

I was just about to reach in my bag for my pocket-pack of Agents’ Wipes™ (‘Ideal for removing soot, grave-dirt and ectoplasm stains’) when I chanced to brush against the wall beside the door. A thin, sharp shock crackled out like sheet lightning across the back of my hand. I flinched away, and then – because I knew the sensation for what it was – deliberately placed my fingers back on the cold, rough plaster.

At once, as if I’d switched a radio on, I heard voices beside me in the room. I closed my eyes, turned to face the chamber, let my mind fill in the image that the sounds suggested.

A group of men, several of them, stood around the dissecting table. I picked up a general murmur of conversation, laughter, the smell of strong tobacco. There was something in the middle of the room; something on the table. One voice, louder, more assertive than the others, rose above the rest. The hubbub quietened, to be replaced by a solemn round of chinking glasses. The echoes faded.

And swelled again. This time I heard noise from a single throat – a busy, preoccupied whistling, as of someone deeply engaged in a pleasant task. He was sawing something: I heard the rasping of the blade. Silence fell . . . and now there was something else inside the room. I felt its presence in the horrible sense of spectral cold, in the sudden dread that made my teeth rattle in my gums. Also in a hateful sound I’d heard before: the burring wings of innumerable flies.

A voice sounded in the darkness.

‘
Try Wilberforce. He’s eager. He’ll do it.
’

Instantly the whistling and the sawing noise were gone. But the buzzing grew stronger, and now the terrible cold rose up to engulf me, just as it had three nights before when I stood beside the Bickerstaff grave. I opened my mouth in pain. And as I did so, there suddenly came a single cry from many throats, screamed directly in my ear.

‘
Give us back our bones!
’

I jerked my hand from the wall. At once, like water sluicing down a drain, the deathly cold was sucked away, and I felt again the clammy warmth of the empty room.

George and Lockwood stood by the table, watching me.

I took my thermos from my bag and drank hot tea before telling them what I’d heard.

‘The sound of the flies,’ I said at last, ‘the desperate cold . . . it was just the same as in the cemetery. Both are to do with the bone glass, I think. Bickerstaff definitely constructed it here.’

Lockwood tapped the surface of the table. ‘To do
what
, though? That’s the question. You look in the bone glass, and what do you see?’

‘I don’t know. But that idiot made something very bad.’

‘This voice you heard . . .’ George said. ‘Was it Bickerstaff, do you think?’

‘Maybe. But actually I thought it sounded more like—’

It’s never great when one of us breaks off halfway through a sentence like that. It’s always bad news. Generally speaking it means something’s happened, or is very much
about
to happen, and we have to stop talking or die.

‘Do you hear it?’ I said.

Beyond the half-closed door: a little subtle scraping noise. A limping, shuffling, creeping
something
coming up the passage, and getting ever closer all the time.

‘Turn the lantern low,’ Lockwood whispered.

George hit the switch; the room went almost black. Light enough to see by, dark enough for our psychic senses to stay strong. Without words we fanned out in the old Plan D positions: me to the right of the door, pressed close against the wall; George to its left, slightly further out, so that he was clear if spectral forces smashed the door aside. Lockwood stood directly in front, ready to face the main attack. We each drew our rapiers. I wiped my left hand on my leggings, removing sudden perspiration. This is the worst part: when the Visitor’s still concealed. When you know it’s coming, but the full horror has yet to hit you. It’s a time for the mind to play its tricks, for paralysing fear to set in. To distract myself I ran my hand across the pouches in my belt, counting, memorizing, making sure everything was ready.

The soft, soft noises drew close. Through the crack in the door came a palely spreading light. In its heart a shadow swelled and gathered.

Lockwood’s arm moved back; the metal glinted. I raised my sword.

An unseen force struck the door, which was thrown violently back to hit George in the face. A fizz, a crack – a dark shape sprang into the room. Lockwood danced forward, swung his rapier. There was a strangled squawk of alarm.

For an instant nothing moved; Lockwood seemed frozen. My rapier too hung halfway through its arc; my muscles had locked as soon as I heard the breaking canister, and smelled the salt and iron scattered around me on the floor.

I plucked out my torch, switched it full on, illuminating Lockwood in mid attack position, the point of his rapier inches from Quill Kipps’s throat. Kipps had one leg slightly raised; he was leaning backwards with a goggling expression on his face, his chest going rapidly up and down. His own rapier-tip was wobbling in mid-air a short distance from Lockwood’s stomach.

Crowded in the doorway behind stood Kat Godwin, holding a night lantern, and Ned Shaw, clasping another salt bomb. Little Bobby Vernon’s startled eyes peered from the darkness somewhere south of Shaw’s left armpit. Each unlovely visage displayed mingled bafflement and terror.

Silence reigned, except for George’s muffled swearing behind the door.

All at once Lockwood and Kipps jumped away from one another with exclamations of disgust.

‘What the hell are
you
doing?’ Kipps croaked.

‘I might ask you the same thing.’

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘It’s
precisely
my business,’ Lockwood said. He ran his hand irritably through his hair. ‘It’s
my
business that you’re on. You’re living dangerously, Kipps. You almost got a rapier in the neck there.’

‘Me? We thought you were a Visitor. If it wasn’t for my bullet-speed reactions I’d have completely disembowelled
you
.’

Lockwood raised an eyebrow. ‘Hardly. It was only because I could already see that you saw who I was that I stopped myself driving the pommel of your own sword sharply back into your abdomen using the Baedecker-Flynn reverse-strike manoeuvre. Lucky for you that I did, and so didn’t.’

There was a pause. ‘Well,’ Kipps said, ‘if I understood what you were talking about I’d no doubt have a neat retort.’ He returned his rapier to his belt. Lockwood stowed his too. Ned Shaw, Bobby Vernon and Kat Godwin loped scowlingly into the room. George emerged from behind the door, rubbing a nose that seemed even smaller and stubbier than before. For a while no one said much, but there was a great deal of assertive clinking as rapiers and other weapons were grudgingly put away.

‘So,’ Lockwood said, ‘you’ve resorted to simply following us about, have you? That’s pretty low.’

‘Following
you
?’ Kipps gave a derisory laugh. ‘We, my friend, are following the leads young Bobby Vernon here uncovered in the Archives. It wouldn’t surprise me if you were following
us
.’

‘No need for that. George’s research is doing us just fine.’

Bobby Vernon tittered. ‘Really? After that display on Wimbledon Common I’m surprised Cubbins still
has
a job.’

Lockwood frowned. ‘It’s going to be a pleasure to win this contest, Quill. By the way, your advert in
The Times
doesn’t have to be too large. A plainly written half-page admission of defeat will do absolutely fine.’

‘That’s assuming Kipps can actually read and write,’ George said.

Ned Shaw stirred. ‘Careful what you say, Cubbins.’

‘I’m sorry. Let me rephrase it. I’ll bet there are apes in the Borneo rainforests with a better grasp of literacy than him.’

Shaw’s eyes bulged; he fumbled at his belt. ‘Right, that’s it—’

Lockwood flicked his coat aside, put his hand to his sword. At once Kipps, George and Godwin did the same.

‘Stop this!’ I cried. ‘Stop this nonsense, all of you!’

Six faces turned to me.

I’d raised my voice. I’d clenched my fists. I may even have stamped a foot. I did what was necessary to snap them out of it. Their rage was escalating out of control, and with it the danger hanging over us grew dark and palpable. Negative emotions in haunted places are never a good idea – and anger’s probably the worst of all.

‘Can’t you feel it?’ I hissed. ‘The atmosphere’s changing. You’re stirring up the energies in the house. You’ve got to shut up,
right now
.’

There was a silence. They were variously concerned, disgruntled and embarrassed, but they did as I told them.

Lockwood took a deep breath. ‘Thanks, Luce,’ he said. ‘You’re right.’

The others nodded. ‘I know anger’s out,’ George said. ‘But what about sarcasm? Is that a no-no too?’

‘Hush.’

We waited. Tension hung heavy in the air.

‘Think we stopped it?’ Quill Kipps said at last. ‘Think we were just in time?’

Even as he spoke, the element in Kat Godwin’s night lantern flickered, dwindled, flared again. George unclipped his thermometer and switched on the dial. ‘Temp’s dropping. Ten degrees now. It was fourteen here when we came in.’

‘The air’s getting thick,’ Bobby Vernon muttered. ‘There’s a miasma building.’

I nodded. ‘I’m getting aural phenomena. A rustling.’

Kat Godwin could hear it too; her face was grey and drawn. ‘It sounds like . . . like . . .’