Jonathan Stroud - Lockwood & Co - The Whispering Skull

It was still, silent, very tall and thin, and only partially substantial. The iron coffin passed straight through one corner of its long grey robe. Glistening swirls of plasm, short and stubby like the feelers of anemones, flexed and curled outwards from the base of the apparition – but there were no arms or legs, just the plunging robe. Its head, swathed in a long, curled hood, could not be seen. Except for two details: a pale sharp chin, dull white as fish-bones, and an open mouth of jagged teeth.

I opened my own mouth and – in the heartbeat that it took to shout a warning – heard a voice speak in my mind.

‘ Look! Look! ’

‘George . . .’

‘ I give you your heart’s desire – ’

‘George!’

Because he wasn’t moving, and neither was Joplin, though the figure was directly in their view. Both of them were still half bent, frozen in the act of brushing the mud off the coffin. Their eyes were wide and staring, their faces transfixed.

‘ Look . . . ’

The voice was deep and lulling – yet also coldly repellent. It muddled my senses; I longed to obey it, but was desperate to defy it too.

I forced myself to move.

And the figure also moved. It rose up, a great grey column, faint against the stars.

Behind me, someone shouted. No time. I drew my sword.

The shape loomed over George and Joplin. All at once they seemed to snap out of their trance; their heads jerked up, they started back. I heard George cry out. Joplin dropped his papers. The figure hung there, frozen for an instant. I knew what it would do. I knew it would suddenly arch down, drop like a falling jet of water. It would engulf them. It would consume them both.

I was too far away. Stupid . . . The rapier was useless.

No time to change: no time to reach for anything in my belt. The rapier –

The shape dropped down – the open mouth, the teeth descending in an arc.

I threw the sword; it spun like a wheel against the sky.

Joplin, tripping over his own feet in his panic, knocked George to the side. George, retreating, fumbling in his belt for some defence, lost his balance, began to fall—

‘ I give you your heart’s desire – ’

The sword passed directly between George and Joplin, just above their heads. The silver-coated blade sliced point-first through the cowled face.

The figure vanished. The voice in my head cut off. A psychic impact-wave sped out from the centre of the circle and knocked me off my feet. Lockwood, hair flying, coat flapping, ran past me down into the pit. He skidded to a halt beside the chains and scanned the scene with glittering eyes. But it was OK. George was OK. Joplin was OK. The coffin was quiet. The summer stars were shining overhead.

The Visitor had gone.

8

In the event, Lockwood was fairly restrained. He said nothing at the cemetery. He said nothing on the way home. He waited while we locked the door and reset the ghost-wards and dumped our bags in the corner and visited the facilities. Then his restraint ran out. He marched George straight to the living room and, without so much as a pause for our normal post-case crisps and cocoa, gave him the rollocking he deserved.

‘I’m surprised at you,’ he said. ‘You put your own life – and that stupid Mr Joplin’s – at immediate risk. You were seconds away from being ghost-touched. If it wasn’t for Lucy, you would have been! And don’t give me any of that guff about how you thought the Source was neutralized. It’s against all the rules to let a non-agent anywhere near an active Source in an operative situation. You know that! What were you thinking?’

George had parked himself in his favourite chair by the coffee table. His face, usually so inexpressive, showed a mix of contrition, defiance and attempted unconcern. ‘We’d been talking about the inscription on the lid,’ he said sullenly. ‘Once DEPRAC gets its hands on the coffin today we know we’ll never see it again, so Joplin said—’

‘What Joplin said shouldn’t have had any effect on you!’ Lockwood cried. ‘You think that’s a good excuse for nearly getting killed? Trying to decipher some scratchings on a foul old coffin? I’m surprised at you, George! Honestly surprised.’

He wasn’t really, and nor was I. One of George’s most famous characteristics, aside from sarcasm, wind and general bloody-mindedness, was his fascination with things unknown. When he wasn’t roaming dusty archives researching background stuff on cases, he roamed dusty archives researching Visitor Theory – trying to discover why ghosts were returning, and how precisely this occurred. It wasn’t just the skull in our ghost-jar that fascinated him; where possible, he also investigated other objects of psychic power. It figured that the iron coffin fell into that category.

It also figured that the tiresome little scholar, Joplin, shared George’s approach.

Lockwood had fallen silent now. He waited, arms folded, clearly expecting an apology, but George wasn’t giving up the argument quite yet. ‘I agree that the coffin and its contents are dangerous,’ he said doggedly. ‘That mirror I saw was horrible. But their powers are entirely unknown. So I think it’s a legitimate agency job to discover anything we can about what it is we’re dealing with – and that includes the inscription. It could have given us some clues to what Bickerstaff – and his ghost – were up to.’

‘Who cares?’ Lockwood cried. ‘Who cares about any of that? It’s not part of our job !’ In many ways, Lockwood was the complete opposite of George, and not just in terms of bodily hygiene. He had no interest in the mechanics of ghosts, and little in their individual desires or intentions. All he really wanted was to destroy them as efficiently as possible. As much as anything, however, I guessed it was George’s careless amateurism that had truly offended him here. ‘That kind of stuff,’ he went on more quietly, ‘is for Barnes and DEPRAC to worry about. Not us. Right, Lucy?’

‘Right! Of course it isn’t. Absolutely not.’ I adjusted a corner of my skirt carefully. ‘Though sometimes it is interesting . . . So did you actually see the inscription, George? I never thought to ask.’

George nodded. ‘I did, as it happens.’

‘What did it say?’

‘It said: As you value your soul, forsake and abjure this cursed box. Just that.’

I hesitated. ‘Forsake and abjure?’

‘It means don’t open it, basically.’

‘Well, it’s a bit late for that now.’

Lockwood had been glaring at us throughout. He cleared his throat. ‘It doesn’t really matter any more, does it?’ he said sweetly. ‘Because, as I keep telling you, Bickerstaff and his mirror thing are no longer any of our business . And George—’

‘Hold on,’ I said suddenly. ‘We’re talking about this being Edmund Bickerstaff. But how does that square with Joplin’s story of how Bickerstaff died? That bloke in the coffin wasn’t torn apart by rats, was he? He’d had a bullet through his head.’

George nodded. ‘You’re right. Good point, Lucy.’

‘Though I suppose he might have been shot and then sort of nibbled.’

‘I guess so . . . But he seemed in one piece to me.’

‘ It doesn’t matter! ’ Lockwood exclaimed. ‘If the case was open, it would be interesting, as you say. But the job’s done now. It’s over. Forget it! The important thing is that we did what we were paid to do, which was to locate and contain the Source.’