Lockwood (30 page)

‘Perhaps you’re unaware,’ Lockwood began, ‘that this room—’

Shaw chuckled again. ‘Oh, I can see it all. The death-glow, the miasma forming. There’s even a little ghost-fog . . . Yeah, it’s not a place to linger.’

Lockwood’s eyes narrowed. ‘In that case’ – he drew his rapier – ‘you’ll agree we can leave right now.’ He stepped towards him. Shaw hesitated, and then – it was almost as if those hinges I mentioned were in position and nicely oiled – swung back and let us through.

‘Thanks,’ Lockwood said.

Whether it was the way he said it – lightly, but with amused disdain; whether it was my look of utter contempt, or the grin on George’s face, or simply a pressure inside that could not be borne, but Ned Shaw suddenly cracked. He ripped his rapier clear and, in the same movement, jabbed at Lockwood’s back. I knew the move; it was a Komiyama Twist, used on Spectres, Wraiths and Fetches. Not on people.

My gasp as the sword was drawn half warned Lockwood. He began to turn; the rapier point scratched at an angle along the fabric of his coat, caught against the threads and penetrated the cloth. It caught him just beneath his left arm; he cried out and sprang away.

Red-faced, panting, Shaw plunged after him like a maddened bull. Reaching the centre of the landing, Lockwood spun round, struck aside his enemy’s outstretched rapier and cut two parallel lines across the fabric of Shaw’s sword-arm, so that the jacket sleeve hung loose and limp. Shaw gave a bellow of fury.

Footsteps on the stairs. Kipps was taking them two at a time. Kat Godwin and little Bobby Vernon followed on behind. All had their rapiers in their hands.

‘Lockwood!’ Kipps cried. ‘What’s going on?’

‘He started it!’ Shaw cried, frantically warding off a series of remorseless blows as he retreated across the landing. ‘He attacked me! Help!’

‘That’s a lie!’ I shouted. But Kipps was already hurtling to the attack. He advanced on Lockwood side-on. It was a position from which Lockwood would be unable to see him: sneaky and effective – a typical Fittes ploy. And then my
own
anger, which had been bubbling up since Shaw’s treacherous assault, perhaps ever since that night on Wimbledon Common – overwhelmed me. I charged forward, rapier raised.

Before I could reach Kipps, Kat Godwin was upon me. Our blades met with a thin, high clash. The force of her first strike almost drove the weapon out of my hand, but I adjusted my wrist, absorbed the impact and held firm. For a moment we were locked together; I could smell the lemony reek of her perfume, see the crisp stitching on her smart grey jacket. We broke apart, circled each other. Dust rose from our shuffling feet and hung sparkling in the silvery air. It was very cold. There was a ringing in my ears.

George had also made a beeline for Lockwood; he was defending him from Kipps and Vernon on the other side. Lockwood had removed a portion of Shaw’s second sleeve. Bits of ragged cloth lay scattered across the moonlit floor.

Godwin brushed a fleck of hair out of her eyes. Her face was so hard and set, she might have been made of marble. Maybe I looked the same. Part of my mind was yelling at me, telling me to stop and calm down. But it’s hard in haunted houses – emotions get tugged and twisted out of true. I was furious, yes; we all were. But I wondered how far the atmosphere of the house was pulling us all towards extremes – George driving Vernon back with a series of ferocious jabs, then retreating as Kipps caught him on the thigh with a well-timed thrust; Lockwood, with cold, systematic precision, reducing Shaw’s jacket ever closer to ribbons. Godwin . . .

Kat Godwin’s next attack was twice as quick as the ones before. White-faced, eyes staring, she swiped at my sword-arm. The tip of the blade caught me neatly on the exposed skin between the wrist-bones, just beyond the guard. It bit through the skin, making me cry out. I grasped my wrist. Flecks of blood showed between my fingers.

I looked up at her in shock – and then I looked beyond her. My mouth opened. I backed away.

‘Giving up?’ Godwin said.

I shook my head, pointing past her back towards the empty study.

In the centre of the moonlight, in the spot-lit patch below the window, a dark shape was rising from the floor.

A violent silence attended it. Moonbeams writhed and thickened; threads of ghost-fog thrashed and bucked close to the floor. Freezing air rolled out from the room, washing over us, plunging down the stairs. That foul miasma, that odious cloying sweetness, rose up to choke our lungs.

Kat Godwin made an incoherent noise; she’d turned and now stood slack-jawed at my side. The others had lowered their weapons and become similarly transfixed.

Up rose the shape.

‘Oh God,’ someone said. ‘Bickerstaff.’

Not Bickerstaff. I knew that now. Not Bickerstaff, but Wilberforce – the man who’d looked into the mirror. But even
that
was not the full horrible truth of the apparition that we saw.

It
was
vaguely man-shaped – that much was clear – but it was also somehow
wrong
. From certain angles, as it turned and twisted, it had the appearance of a tall gentleman, perhaps wearing some kind of frock coat. The line of the head was plain enough, bowed as if under some great weight, but I could not make sense of the rest. The arms were swollen, the chest and stomach undulating weirdly. Everything was held in shadow; I saw no details.

The figure rose into the light, swaying and shaking, as if responding to some frenzied internal music. The movement was foul: a terror radiated from it through the freezing air. Ghost-lock seized my muscles, I felt my bowels go slack; my rapier trembled in my hand.

Swaying like a drunken man, head lolling, body shifting, writhing with a horrid fluid grace, the figure rose, silhouetted against the moon. Little spreading nets of ice grew and fused on the windowpanes behind it. Still the head was bowed. The body’s contortions – minute but somehow frenzied – redoubled, as if it sought to tear itself to pieces. The head jerked up, it turned towards us: it was a black void that sucked in light.

A desperate voice rang in my mind. ‘
Bickerstaff! No! Show me not the glass!
’

Someone – Godwin, I think – began to scream.

I didn’t blame her. The figure was shaking itself apart.

Like a wet dog, it thrashed from side to side. And as it did so, pieces of its substance broke away. It was as if gobbets of flesh were shaking themselves loose and falling to the floor. As each one landed, the lumps uncoiled, grew elongated, became low black forms that leaped and skittered out across the room, before circling round towards the door.

‘Rats!’ Lockwood cried. ‘Back to the stairs! Get out!’

His voice broke through our ghost-lock; one after another, our training kicked in. Not before time: the first black forms were already upon us. Three, coal-black and shining, with yellow maddened eyes, came springing through the door. One launched itself at George, who met it with a wild swing of his rapier. The rat burst; a shower of bright blue ectoplasm spattered Vernon’s jacket, making him squeal. Lockwood hurled a salt bomb, igniting another rat; it burned with a livid flame. The third scrabbled away and up the wall.

Away by the window, in its nimbus of blue fire, the hellish figure hopped and capered, as if dancing with delight. Ribs shone, arm-bones peeked from the whirling, disintegrating flesh. Fresh chunks and pieces tore themselves free; spectral rats scattered up the walls and across the ceiling. More came through the door.

‘Back!’ Lockwood cried again. He was walking backwards slowly, methodically, slashing at the darting, clawing forms as they drew near. George and I were doing likewise; of the Fittes agents, Shaw and Godwin beat the most orderly retreat. Shaw scattered iron filings in a broad circle so that advancing rats fizzed and leaped and spun. Godwin tossed salt bombs left and right.

Kipps? He’d already scarpered; I heard his boots beating out a cowardly fandango on the stairs. But Bobby Vernon seemed racked with panic, neither attacking nor retreating, his sword hanging limply, eyes locked on the bony, dancing thing.

It sensed his weakness. Visitors always do.

Rats converged upon him along the walls and ceiling. One dropped towards his head; Lockwood sprang close, long coat flapping. He swung his sword and, mid-fall, sliced the rat in two. Plasm fell like molten rain.

Vernon moaned; Lockwood grasped him by the collar, dragged him bodily towards the stairs. From left, from right, the swift black forms came darting. I threw a salt bomb, drove them shrieking back. The landing was awash with salt and iron; burning rats shrank and dwindled on all sides.

We reached the stairs; Lockwood flung Vernon ahead of him, jumped over a writhing rat that collided with the skirting, and clattered down. I was the last. I looked back into the empty room. In its livid fire, the thing by the window was almost reduced to bones. As I watched, I saw it fall back, disintegrate entirely into a dozen darting forms that whirled round and round and round.

‘
I beg you
,’ roared the despairing, distant voice. ‘
Show me not the glass!
’

I pelted round the curve of the stairs, down along the hallway, towards the open door.

‘
Not the glass . . .
’

I fell out of the front door, across the porch and into the long, wet moonlit grass. The summer night enfolded me; for the first time I realized how cold I’d been. Shaw and Godwin had already collapsed on the ground. Vernon was slumped against one of the pillars of the porch. George and Kipps had discarded their rapiers and were bent over almost double, gasping, hands clamped against their knees.

Lockwood was hardly out of breath. I looked up at the window overhead, where, lit by flickering blue other-light, the stick-thin figure and the rats could still be seen, dancing and capering. Rats leaped and bounded, ran up and down the walls and across the ceiling. They merged in and out of the figure, building it up to momentarily resemble a Victorian gentleman with swaying tail-coats, then stripping it back to the bones again.

The light winked out. The house was dark beneath the moon.

I turned away; and as I did so, a brief, malevolent chuckling sounded in my mind. From the back of George’s rucksack a faint green glow flared once, then faded.

Now there was nothing but seven exhausted agents scattered wheezing on the quiet hill.

‘Destroy it!’ I cried. ‘That’s the only option. We take it to the furnaces and we burn the thing now!’

‘Yes,’ Lockwood murmured, ‘but is that really practical?’

‘Of course it isn’t,’ George said. ‘We simply can’t do it. It’s too important for us – and for psychic science generally. And Luce, flicking marmalade at my head is really not a valid argument. You’ve got to calm down.’

‘I’ll calm down,’ I snarled, ‘when this cursed skull is off the premises.’ I threw the marmalade spoon at the jar. It struck the side of the glass, bounced off with a ping, and landed in the butter.

‘
Oh, dear . . .
’ A mocking whisper sounded in my head. ‘
Temper, temper . . . This is
such
an exhibition
.’

‘And
you
can shut up!’ I said. ‘I don’t need
you
to butt in too!’

Morning had come, which meant yet more crystal-clear skies, another late breakfast, and – in my case at least – the releasing of a
lot
of pent-up rage. It hadn’t come out on our long journey home from Hampstead, nor in my fitful sleep; it hadn’t even stirred when I came into the kitchen and saw the ghost-jar on the worktop. But when, as we discussed the night’s events, I heard the ghost’s hoarse chuckle cutting through my mind, my control finally snapped. I’d leaped at the jar, and it was all Lockwood could do to prevent me from smashing it there and then.

‘I keep telling you, it lured us to the house!’ I said. ‘It
knew
about the horror in that room! It
knew
Wilberforce’s ghost would be there! That’s why it let slip about the papers in the first place; that’s why it led us upstairs. It’s vindictive and evil, and we were fools to listen to it. You should have heard it laughing at us last night, and now it’s doing it again!’