Jonathan Stroud - Lockwood & Co - The Whispering Skull

Lockwood shook his head. ‘That’s the paradox about all this. You can’t find out the truth without looking in the mirror, and looking in the mirror tends to kill you.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess one way or another it does show you the Other Side.’

‘I think it was a window.’ George looked up from his work. The bruises on his face were still obvious, but the sparkle had returned to his eyes. He had a new pair of glasses on. ‘To me, Bickerstaff’s theory makes a weird kind of sense. Ghosts come into this world via a weak spot. We call that the Source. If you put enough Sources together, just maybe you’ll create a big enough hole to see through. It’s a fascinating idea that—’ He broke off, realizing we were staring at him. ‘Um, that I’m not interested in any more. Who wants another flapjack?’

‘It’s all irrelevant, anyway,’ I said, ‘since I broke the mirror. It’s useless now.’

‘Is it, though?’ George flashed us a dark glance. ‘DEPRAC has the pieces. Maybe they’ll try to put it back together. We don’t know what goes on in Scotland Yard. Or at Fittes House, for that matter. Did you see all those books in that library? They even had Mary Dulac’s pamphlet – and how obscure was that? There could be so much hidden knowledge in that room.’

‘ George ,’ I said.

‘I know. I’ll shut up now. I’m only talking. I know the mirror was a horrible thing.’

‘Speaking of horrible objects,’ I said, ‘what are we going to do about this one?’ The ghost-jar was on the corner of my desk, covered with a woollen tea-cosy. It had been there for three days. Since the events at Kensal Green the ghost had stubbornly refused to appear; no face, no voice, not even the slightest plasmic glow. The skull sat clamped at the base of the jar, staring out with vacant sockets. There was no sign of the malignant spirit; all the same, for reasons of privacy, we kept the lever on the top tightly closed.

‘Yes,’ Lockwood said. ‘We need to make a decision about that. It actually helped you in the catacombs, you said?’

‘Yeah . . .’ I glared at the silent cosy. It was a stripy orange one that had been knitted by George’s mum and given to Lockwood as a present. It covered the jar quite well. ‘The skull spent half the time cheering because we were about to die,’ I said. ‘But on several occasions it did seem to be vaguely helpful. And right at the end – when the mirror had me, and I could feel myself slipping away – it spoke and snapped me out of it.’ I frowned. ‘Don’t know if it really meant to. If it did, it was probably only because of all the threats I made. We know what a twisted thing it is. In Hampstead it almost got us killed.’

‘So what do we do with it?’ Lockwood said.

‘It’s a Type Three,’ George put in; he spoke almost apologetically. ‘I know I shouldn’t say this, but it’s too important to be destroyed.’

Lockwood sat back in his chair. ‘It’s up to Lucy. She’s the one most affected by it. George is right: the skull may yet be valuable, and we had big ideas about revealing it to the world. But is it truly worth the hassle and the risk?’

I pulled the cosy up and stared into the jar for a moment. ‘If I’m honest,’ I said, ‘the last thing I’d want now is to tell anyone about my connection with this ghost. What would happen? It would be like with Bickerstaff’s mirror, only worse. Everyone would go crazy. DEPRAC would take me off and do endless experiments, trying to find out stuff from the skull. It would be hell. I’d never get any peace. So if you don’t mind, can we keep it quiet for now?’

‘Of course we can,’ Lockwood said. ‘No problem.’

‘As for destroying it,’ I went on, ‘I’m not sure that we should. When I was in the catacombs, I heard the voices of the spirits trapped inside the mirror. They weren’t wicked – just very sad. They weren’t talking to me like the skull does, but they communicated with me, even so. That’s why I broke the thing: it’s what they wanted. What I’m saying is, I’m getting better at understanding my Talent; I think it may be getting stronger. And I’ve definitely never had as strong a connection with any other spirit as I have with this skull. So for better or for worse, even though it’s a nasty, conniving, deceitful thing that mixes truth and lies in everything it says, I think we have to keep it here. For the moment. Maybe it’ll be properly useful to us all one day.’

After my little speech we were quiet for a time. George took up his pen. I did some paperwork. Lockwood sat staring at the window, deep in thought.

‘There’s a picture here of that warehouse where Julius Winkman held his auction,’ George said, holding up a clipping. ‘You didn’t tell me the roof was that high.’

‘Yep,’ I said. ‘Our jump was even scarier than Flo Bones’s boat. What time’s Flo coming over this evening, Lockwood?’

‘Six. I still think it’s a bit dangerous inviting her to dinner, but we owe her lots of favours. We’d better get in a ton of liquorice too. By the way, did I tell you I found out how Winkman’s men traced us? Winkman had an informer working at DEPRAC. When Lucy and I got caught at his shop, that first time, he made enquiries and learned which agents had been put on the case. So, after the auction, he already had a good idea who we were. He sent men after us, and they tailed us to the cemetery.’

‘It’s not very nice to think that Winkman knows our names,’ George said.

‘Hopefully he’ll be a bit too busy to worry about that for a while.’

‘There is one other thing,’ I said. It had been at the back of my mind for days, but only now, in the calm and dappled sunlight, did it find space to come forward. ‘When we were in the Fittes library, and we saw Penelope Fittes talking with that man . . . She gave him something – a box; I don’t know if either of you saw.’

‘Not me,’ Lockwood said. ‘My head was turned away.’

‘I was contorted into an impossibly small space under the table,’ George said. ‘You don’t want to know what I was looking at.’

‘Well, I’ve no idea what was in that box,’ I went on, ‘but it had a symbol printed on the outside. George – you remember those goggles you pinched from Fairfax at Combe Carey Hall?’

‘I not only remember . . .’ George ferreted in a particularly messy corner of his desk. ‘I have them here.’ He held up the goggles: thick and rubbery, with crystal eyepieces. We’d studied them a bit over recent months, but we’d been unable to make much of them.

‘Look at your desk!’ I chided. ‘You are so like Joplin . . . Yes, there – see the little harp design on the lens? That symbol was stamped on Ms Fittes’ box too.’

Lockwood and George regarded it. ‘Curious. It’s not a logo of any company I know,’ Lockwood said. ‘Think it’s some internal department of the Fittes Agency, George?’

‘No. Not an official one, anyway. Come to think of it, the whole meeting was a bit odd. What was it that Ms Fittes and that bloke were discussing? Some group or other? Couldn’t hear too well; my knees were against my ears.’ He took off his new spectacles and lowered them to his jumper, then thought better of it and self-consciously raised them to his nose again.

‘It’s all right,’ I remarked. ‘You’re allowed to rub your glasses. You’re not at all like Joplin, really.’

Lockwood, busy selecting another flapjack, nodded. ‘Nothing like him. He was a weird, friendless sociopath with a morbid death-obsession, while you . . .’ He picked up the plate. ‘Biscuit, Luce?’

‘Thanks.’

‘While I . . .’ George prompted.