Jonathan Stroud - Lockwood & Co - The Whispering Skull

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.

Long ago, Marissa Fittes – one of the first two psychical investigators in Britain – claimed to have encountered certain spirits with which she held full conversations. She mentioned this in several books, and implied (she was never very forthcoming about the details ) that they had told her certain secrets: about death, about the soul, about its passage to a place beyond. After her own demise, others had tried to achieve similar results; a few even claimed to have done so, but their accounts were never verified. It became a point of faith among most agents that Type Threes existed, but that they remained almost impossible to find. That’s certainly what I’d believed.

Then the spirit in the jar – that selfsame one with the horrid goggly face – had talked to me .

I had been alone in the basement at the time. I’d knocked over the ghost-jar, twisting one of the levers in its stopper, so that the hidden grille was exposed. And all at once I heard the ghost’s voice talking in my head – really talking, I mean, addressing me by name. It told me things too – vague, unpleasant things of the death’s coming variety – until I turned the lever and shut it up.

Which may have been a mistake, because it had never spoken again.

Lockwood and George, when I told them about my encounter, had reacted at first with vast excitement. They raced to the basement, took out the jar and swung the lever; the face in the jar said nothing. We tried a series of experiments, turning the lever differing degrees, trying at different times of day and night, sitting expectantly beside the jar, even hiding out of sight. Still the ghost was silent. Occasionally it materialized as before, and glared at us in a resentful, truculent manner, but it never spoke or seemed inclined to do so.

It was a disappointment to us all, for different reasons. Lockwood was acutely aware of the prestige our agency would have gained from the event, if it could be proved. George thought of the fascinating insights that might be gained from someone speaking from beyond the grave. To me it was more personal, a sudden revelation of the terrifying potential of my Talent. It frightened me and filled me with foreboding, and there was a part of me that was relieved when it didn’t happen again. But I was annoyed too. Just that one fleeting incident, and both Lockwood and George had looked at me with new respect. If it could be repeated, if it could be confirmed for all to see, I would in one fell swoop become the most celebrated operative in London. But the ghost remained stubbornly silent, and as the months passed, I almost began to doubt that anything significant had occurred at all.

Lockwood, in his practical fashion, had finally turned his attention to other things, though in every new case he made sure to double-check what voices, if any, I could hear. But George had persisted with his investigations into the skull, attempting ever more fanciful methods to get the ghost to respond. Failure hadn’t discouraged him. If anything, it had increased his passion.

I could see his eyes gleaming now behind his glasses as he studied the silent jar.

‘Clearly it’s aware of us,’ he mused. ‘In some way it’s definitely conscious of what’s going on around it. It knew your name. It knew mine too – you told me. It must be able to hear things through the glass.’

‘Or lip-read,’ I pointed out. ‘We do quite often have it uncovered.’

‘I suppose . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Who knows? So many questions! Why is it here? What does it want? Why talk to you? I’ve had it for years, and it never even tried to talk to me.’

‘Well, there wouldn’t have been much point, would there? You don’t have that Talent.’ I tapped the bottle-glass with a fingernail. ‘How long have you actually had this jar, George? You stole it, didn’t you? I forget how.’

George sat heavily in his chair, making the wood creak. ‘It was back when I was at the Fittes Agency, before I got kicked out for insubordination. I was working at Fittes House on the Strand. You ever been in there?’

‘Only for an interview. It didn’t last long.’

‘Well, it’s a vast place,’ George said. ‘You’ve got the famous public rooms, where people come for help – all those glass booths with receptionists taking down their details. Then there’s the conference halls, where they display all their famous relics, and the mahogany boardroom overlooking the Thames. But there’s a lot of secret stuff too, which most of the agents can’t access. The Black Library, for instance, where Marissa’s original collection of books is kept under lock and key. I always wanted to browse in there. But the bit that really interested me was underground. There are basements that go deep down, and some of them stretch back out under the Thames, they say. I used to see supervisors going down in special service lifts, and sometimes I’d see jars like this being wheeled into the lifts on trolleys. I often asked what all this was about. Safe storage, they said; there were vaults where they kept dangerous Visitors safe until they could be incinerated in furnaces on the lowest level.’

‘Furnaces?’ I said. ‘The Fittes furnaces are over in Clerkenwell, aren’t they? Everyone uses them. Why’d they need more down underground?’

‘I wondered that,’ George said. ‘I wondered about a lot of things. It used to annoy me that I got no answers. Anyway, in the end I asked so many questions that they fired me. My supervisor – a woman named Sweeny, face like an old sock soaked in vinegar – gave me an hour to clear my desk. And as I was standing there, gathering a few things up in a cardboard box, I saw a trolley with two or three jars being pushed towards the lift. The porter got called away. So what did I do? Only slipped over and nicked the nearest jar. I put it in my box, hid it under an old jumper, and carried it away right under Sweeny’s nose.’ He grinned in triumph at the memory. ‘And that’s why we’ve got our very own haunted skull. Who’d have thought it would turn out to be a genuine Type Three?’

‘If it actually is one,’ I said doubtfully. ‘It hasn’t done anything much for ages.’

‘Don’t worry. We’ll find a way to get it to speak again.’ George was polishing his glasses on his T-shirt. ‘We’ve got to. The stakes are so high, Luce. Fifty years since the Problem began, and we’ve hardly scratched the surface understanding ghosts. There are mysteries all around us, everywhere we look.’

I nodded absently. Riveting as George was, my mind had flitted elsewhere. I was staring at Lockwood’s empty desk. One of his jackets hung over the back of his old cracked chair.

‘Speaking of a mystery slightly closer to home,’ I said slowly, ‘don’t you ever wonder about Lockwood’s door upstairs? That one on the landing.’

George shrugged. ‘No.’

‘You must do.’

He blew out his cheeks. ‘Of course I wonder. But it’s his business. Not ours.’

‘I mean, what can be in there? He’s just so touchy about it. I asked him about it last week, and he nearly snapped my head off again.’