Lockwood (5 page)

For the moment, though, we were still a small outfit, the smallest in London. Anthony Lockwood, George Cubbins and Lucy Carlyle: just the three of us, rubbing along together at 35 Portland Row. Living and working side by side.

George? The last seven months hadn’t changed him much. With regards to his general scruffiness, sharp tongue and fondness for bottom-hugging puffa jackets, this was obviously a matter for regret. But he was still a tireless researcher, capable of unearthing vital facts about each and every haunted location. He was the most careful of us too, the least likely to jump headlong into danger; this quality had kept us all alive more than once. George also retained his habit of taking off his glasses and polishing them on his jumper whenever he was (a) utterly sure of himself, (b) irritated, or (c) bored rigid by my company, which, one way or another, seemed pretty much all the time. But he and I were getting along better now. In fact, we’d only had one full-on, foot-stamping, saucepan-hurling row that month, which was itself some kind of record.

George was very interested in the science and philosophy of Visitors: he wanted to understand their nature, and the reasons for their return. To this end he conducted a series of experiments on our collection of spectral Sources – old bones or other fragments that retained some ghostly charge. This hobby of his was sometimes a little annoying. I’d lost track of the times I’d tripped over electricity cables clamped to some relic, or been startled by a severed limb while rummaging in the deep freeze for fish fingers and frozen peas.

But at least George
had
hobbies (comic books and cooking were two of the others). Anthony Lockwood was quite another matter. He had few interests outside his work. On our rare days off, he would lie late in bed, riffling through the newspapers, or re-reading tattered novels from the shelves about the house. At last he’d fling them aside, do some moody rapier practice, then begin preparing for our next assignment. Little else seemed to interest him.

He never discussed old cases. Something propelled him ever onwards. At times an almost obsessive quality to his energy could be glimpsed beneath the urbane exterior. But he never gave a clue as to what drove him, and I was forced to develop my own speculations.

Outwardly he was just as energetic and mercurial as ever, passionate and restless, a continual inspiration. He still wore his hair dashingly swept back, still had a fondness for too-tight suits; was just as courteous to me as he’d been the day we met. But he also remained – and I had become increasingly aware of this fact the longer I observed him – ever so slightly detached: from the ghosts we discovered, from the clients we took on, perhaps even (though I didn’t find this easy to admit) from his colleagues, George and me.

The clearest evidence of this lay in the personal details we each revealed. It had taken me months to summon up the courage, but in the end I’d told them both a good deal about my childhood, my unhappy experiences in my first apprenticeship, and the reasons I’d had for leaving home. George too was full of stories – which I seldom listened to – mostly about his upbringing in north London. It had been unexcitingly normal; his family was well-balanced and no one seemed to have died or disappeared. He’d even once introduced us to his mother, a small, plump, smiley woman who had called Lockwood ‘ducks’, me ‘darling’, and given us all a homemade cake. But Lockwood? No. He rarely spoke about himself, and certainly
never
about his past or his family. After a year of living with him in his childhood home I still knew nothing about his parents at all.

This was particularly frustrating because the whole of 35 Portland Row was filled to overflowing with their artefacts and heirlooms, their books and furniture. The walls of the living room and stairwell were covered with strange objects: masks, weapons, and what seemed to be ghost-hunting equipment from far-off cultures. It seemed obvious that Lockwood’s parents had been researchers or collectors of some kind, with a special interest in lands beyond Europe. But where they were (or, more likely, what had happened to them), Lockwood never said. And there seemed to be no photographs or personal mementoes of them anywhere.

At least, not in any of the rooms I visited.

Because I thought I knew where the answers to Lockwood’s past might be.

There was a certain door on the first-floor landing of the house. Unlike every other door in 35 Portland Row, this one was never opened. When I’d arrived, Lockwood had requested that it remain closed, and George and I had always obeyed him. The door had no lock that I could see, and as I passed it every day, its plain exterior (blank, except for a rough rectangle where some label or sticker had been removed) presented an almost insolent challenge. It dared me to guess what was behind it, defied me to peek inside. So far, I’d resisted the temptation – more out of prudence than simple nicety. The one or two occasions when I’d even
mentioned
the room to Lockwood had not gone down too well.

And what about me, Lucy Carlyle, still the newest member of the company? How had I altered that first year?

Outwardly, not so much. My hair remained in a multi-purpose, ectoplasm-avoiding bob; I wasn’t any sleeker or better-looking than before. Height-wise, I hadn’t grown any. I was still more eager than skilful when it came to fighting, and too impatient to be an excellent researcher like George.

But things
had
changed for me. My time with Lockwood & Co. had given me an assurance I’d previously been lacking. When I walked down the street with my rapier swinging at my side, and the little kids gawping, and the adults giving me deferential nods, I not only knew I had a special status in society, I honestly believed I’d begun to
earn
it too.

My Talents were fast developing. My skill at inner Listening, which had always been good, was growing ever sharper. I heard the whispers of Type Ones, the fragments of speech emitted by Type Twos: few apparitions were entirely silent to me now. My sense of psychic Touch had also deepened. Holding certain objects gave me strong echoes of the past. More and more, I found I had an intuitive feel for the intentions of each ghost; sometimes I could even predict their actions.

All these were rare enough abilities, but they were overshadowed by something deeper – a mystery that hung over all of us at 35 Portland Row, but particularly over me. Seven months before, something had happened that set me apart from Lockwood and George, and all the other agents we competed with. Ever since, my Talent had been the focus of George’s experiments, and our major topic of conversation. Lockwood even believed it might be the foundation of our fortunes, and make us the most celebrated agency in London.

First, though, we had to solve one particular problem.

That problem was sitting on George’s desk, inside a thick glass jar, beneath a jet-black cloth.

It was dangerous and evil, and had the potential to change my life for ever.

It was a skull.

George had left the rapier room now and gone into the main office. I followed him in, taking my tea with me, winding my way amongst the debris of our business: piles of old newspapers, bags of salt, neatly stacked chains and boxes of silver seals. Sunlight streamed through the window that looked out onto the little yard, igniting dust particles in the air. On Lockwood’s desk, between the mummified heart and the bottle of gobstoppers, sat our black leather casebook, containing records of every job we’d undertaken. Soon we’d have to write up the Wimbledon Wraiths in there.

George was standing by his desk, staring at it in a glum sort of way. My desk top gets messy fairly often, but this morning George’s was something else. It was a scene of devastation. Burned matches, lavender candles and pools of melted wax littered the surface. A chaos of tangled wires and naked elements spilled forth from a disembowelled electrical heater. In one corner, a blowtorch lay on its side.

At the other end of the desk something else sat hidden under a black satin cloth.

‘Heat didn’t work, I take it?’ I said.

‘No,’ George said. ‘Hopeless. Couldn’t get it hot enough. I’m going to try putting it in daylight today, see if that spurs him on a bit.’

I regarded the shrouded object. ‘You sure? It didn’t do anything before.’

‘Wasn’t so bright then. I’ll take it out into the garden when the noonday sun comes round.’

I tapped my fingers on the desk. Something that I’d been meaning to say for a while, something that had been on my mind, finally came out. ‘You know that sunlight hurts it,’ I said slowly. ‘You know it burns the plasm.’

George nodded. ‘Yep . . . Obviously. That’s the idea.’

‘Yeah, but that’s hardly going to get the thing to talk, is it?’ I said. ‘I mean, don’t you think it’ll be counterproductive? All your methods seem to involve inflicting pain.’

‘So what? It’s a Visitor. Anyway, do Visitors actually
feel
pain?’ George pulled the cloth away, revealing a glass jar, cylindrical and slightly larger than the average waste-basket. It was sealed at the top with a complex plastic stopper, from which a number of knobs and flanges protruded. George bent close to the jar and flipped a lever, revealing a small rectangular grille within the plastic. He spoke into the grille. ‘Hello in there! Lucy thinks you feel discomfort! I disagree! Care to tell us who’s right?’

He waited. The substance in the jar was dark and still. Something sat motionless in the centre of the murk.

‘It’s daytime,’ I said. ‘Of course it won’t answer.’

George flicked the lever back. ‘It’s not answering out of spite. It’s got a wicked nature. You said as much yourself, after it spoke to you.’

‘We don’t really know, to be honest.’ I stared at the shadow behind the glass. ‘We don’t know anything about it.’

‘Well, we know it told you we were all going to die.’

‘It said “Death is coming”, George. That’s not quite the same thing.’

‘It’s hardly a term of endearment.’ George heaved the tangle of electrical equipment off his desk and dumped it in a box beside his chair. ‘No, it’s hostile to us, Luce. Mustn’t go soft on it now.’

‘I’m not going soft. I just think torturing it isn’t necessarily the way forward. We may need to focus more on its connection with me.’

George gave a noncommittal grunt. ‘Mm. Yes. Your mysterious connection.’

We stood surveying the jar. In ordinary sunlight, like today’s, the glass looked thick and slightly bluish; under moonlight, or artificial illumination, it glinted with a silvery tinge, for this was silver-glass, a ghost-proof material manufactured by the Sunrise Corporation.

And sure enough, within the glass prison was a ghost.

The identity of this spirit was unknown. All that could be certain was that it belonged to the human skull now bolted to the base of the jar. The skull was yellowish-brown and battered, but otherwise unexceptional. It was adult size, but whether a man’s or a woman’s we could not tell. The ghost, being tethered to the skull, was trapped inside the ghost-jar. Most of the time it manifested as a murky greenish plasm that drifted disconsolately behind the glass. Occasionally, and usually at inconvenient moments, such as when you were going past with a hot drink or a full bladder, it congealed violently into a grotesque transparent face, with bulbous nose, goggling eyes and a rubbery mouth of excessive size. This shocking visage would then leer and gape at whoever was in the room. Allegedly George had once seen it blow kisses. Often it seemed to be trying to speak. And it was this apparent ability to communicate that was its central mystery, and why George kept it on his desk.

Visitors, as a rule, don’t talk – at least, not in a very meaningful way. Most of them – the Shades and Lurkers, the Cold Maidens, the Stalkers and other Type Ones – are practically silent, except for a limited repertoire of moans and sighs. Type Twos, more powerful and more dangerous, can sometimes deliver a few half-intelligible words that Listeners like me are able to pick up. These too are often repetitious – imprints on the air that seldom alter, and are often connected to the key emotion that binds the spirit to the earth: terror, anger, or desire for vengeance. What ghosts don’t do, as a rule, is talk
properly
, except for the legendary Type Threes.