Jonathan Stroud - Lockwood & Co - The Whispering Skull

Saunders rolled his eyes. ‘Heaven only knows. I can’t get any sense out of them. Some of the Sensitives saw something, as you heard. Some say it was very tall, others that it wore a cloak or robe. But there’s no consistency. One night-watch kid said it had seven heads. Ridiculous! I sent her home.’

‘Night-watchers don’t normally make up stories,’ George said.

This was true. Most children with strong psychic abilities become agents, but if you’re not quite good enough for that, you swallow your pride and join the night watch. It’s dangerous, low-paid work, mostly taking guard duties after dark, but those kids are talented enough. We never underestimate them.

Lockwood had his hands in the pockets of his long dark coat. His eyes glinted with excitement. ‘It’s all getting curiouser and curiouser,’ he said. ‘Mr Saunders, what’s the current state of the grave? Is it exposed?’

‘The men dug some way down. I believe they struck the coffin.’

‘Excellent. We can deal with it now. George here is good with a spade – aren’t you, George?’

‘Well, I certainly get plenty of practice,’ George said.

The path to the unexpected grave of Edmund Bickerstaff lay along a narrow side-aisle just beyond the excavators’ camp. Saunders led us there in silence. No one else from the camp followed; they hung back in the circle of light beneath the arc lamps, watching us go.

The burials in this part of the cemetery were modest ones – mostly marked by headstones, crosses, or simple statues. It was dark overhead now. The stones, half hidden by thorns and long wet grass, showed white and stark under the moon; but their shadows were black slots into which a man might fall.

After a few minutes of walking, Saunders slowed. Up ahead, piles of brambles marked where a patch of ground had been roughly cleared. Nearby rose a mound of dark, wet earth. A small mechanized backhoe, scuffed and yellow in the light of Saunders’s torch, blocked the path at an angle. Its bucket was still full. Spades, picks and other digging tools lay scattered all around.

‘They left in a hurry,’ Saunders said. His voice was tight and high. ‘Right, this is where I stop. If you want anything, just call.’ With undisguised haste, he drifted back into the dark and we were left alone.

We loosened our rapiers. The night was silent; I was aware of the heavy beating of my heart. Lockwood took a pen-torch from his belt, and shone it into the black space to the left of the path. It was a square plot of open ground, bordered by normal graves and box-tombs. In its centre, a small discoloured slab of stone rose crookedly from the soil. The grass in front of this stone had been scooped away, leaving a broad, gently sloping pit torn in the earth. It was maybe eight feet across and three feet deep. The tooth-marks of the backhoe’s bucket showed as long grooves in the mud. But we had eyes only for the stone.

We used our senses, quickly, quietly, before we did anything else.

‘No death-glows,’ Lockwood said softly. ‘That’s to be expected, because no one’s died here. Got anything?’

‘Nope,’ George said.

‘I have,’ I said. ‘A faint vibration.’

‘A noise? Voices?’

It bothered me – I couldn’t make it out at all. ‘Just a . . . disturbance. There’s definitely something here.’

‘Keep your eyes and ears open,’ Lockwood said. ‘Right, first thing we do, we put a barrier right around. Then I’m checking out the stone. Don’t want to miss anything, like we did last night.’

George set a lantern on one of the box-tombs, and by its light we took out our lengths of chain. We laid them out around the circumference of the pit. When this was finished, Lockwood stepped over the chains and walked towards the stone, hand ready on his sword. George and I waited, watching the shadows.

Lockwood reached the stone; kneeling abruptly, he brushed the grass aside. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘It’s poor-quality material, badly weathered. Scarcely a quarter of the height of a standard headstone. Hasn’t been laid properly – it’s badly tilted. Someone did this very hurriedly . . .’

He switched on the torch and ran the beam over the surface. Decades of lichen had crusted it, and built up deeply in the letters carved there. ‘ Edmund Bickerstaff . . . ’ Lockwood read. ‘And this isn’t proper mason’s work. It’s hardly even an inscription. It’s just been scratched by the first tool that came to hand. So we’ve got a rushed, illegal and very amateur burial, which has been here a long time.’

He stood up. And as he did so, there was the gentlest of rustlings. From behind the grave a figure broke free of the darkness and lurched forwards into the lantern-light. George and I cried out; Lockwood leaped to the side, ripping his rapier clear. He twisted as he jumped, landing in the centre of the pit, facing towards the stone.

‘Sorry,’ Mr Albert Joplin said. ‘Did I startle anyone?’

I cursed under my breath; George whistled. Lockwood only exhaled sharply. Mr Joplin stumbled round the edge of the pit. He moved with an awkward, stoop-shouldered gait that reminded me vaguely of a chimp’s; small showers of grey dandruff drifted about him as he rolled along. His spindly arms were clasped across his sheaf of papers, which he pressed protectively against his narrow chest as a mother shields a child.

He pushed his glasses apologetically up his nose. ‘I’m sorry; I got lost coming from the East Gate. Have I missed anything?’

George spoke – and at that moment I was enveloped by a wave of clawing cold. You know when you jump into a swimming pool, and find they haven’t heated it, and the freezing water hits your body? You feel a smack of pain – awful and all over. This was exactly like that. I let out a gasp of shock. And that wasn’t the worst of it – as the cold hit me, my inner ears kicked into life. That vibration I’d sensed before? It was suddenly loud . Behind the hum of George’s voice and Joplin’s chatter, it had become a muffled buzzing, like an approaching cloud of flies.

‘Lockwood . . .’ I began.

Then it was done. My head cleared. The cold vanished. My skin felt red and raw. The noise shrank into the background once again.

‘. . . really quite extraordinary church, Mr Cubbins,’ Joplin was saying. ‘The best brass-rubbings in London. I must show you some time.’

‘Hey!’ This was Lockwood, standing in the centre of the pit. ‘Hey!’ he called. ‘Look what I’ve found! No, not you, please, Mr Joplin – you’d better stay beyond the iron.’

He had his torch trained on the mud beside his feet. Moving slowly, my head still ringing, I crossed the chains with George and went down into the hole. Our boots trod soft, dark mud.

‘Here,’ Lockwood said. ‘What do you make of this?’

At first I made out nothing in the brightness of the beam. Then, as he moved his torch, I saw it: the long hard reddish edge of something, poking out of the mud.

‘Oh,’ George said. ‘That’s weird.’

‘Is it the coffin?’ Little Mr Joplin was hovering beyond the chains, craning his thin neck eagerly. ‘The coffin, Mr Lockwood?’

‘I don’t know . . .’

‘Most coffins I’ve seen are made of wood,’ George murmured. ‘Most Victorian coffins would have long since rotted in the ground. Most are buried at a respectable six feet, with all the proper rites and regulations . . .’

There was a silence. ‘And this?’ Joplin said.

‘Is only four feet down, and has been tipped in at an angle, like they wanted to get shot of it as fast as possible. And it hasn’t rotted because it isn’t made of wood at all. This box is made of iron.’

‘Iron . . .’ Lockwood said. ‘An iron coffin—’