Jonathan Stroud - Lockwood & Co. Book Three - The Hollow Boy

I was at a cross-junction; two other passages extended out from my corridor, to left and right. The one to my left was immediately blocked by a set of metal bars, rusted, twisted, blackened by age. To the right, my candlelight reflected on steps that disappeared into a solid expanse of foul-smelling, jet-black water. I ignored both side passages and continued straight on, and almost immediately stepped out over a pile of shattered wood into a larger space.

Somebody was whispering up ahead. When I lifted the candle, the whispers went still.

“Don’t be shy,” I said. “Speak up.”

I laughed. They were shy. They were very quiet. The ground was tilting in front of me again. My head hurt, and for a moment my vision blurred; then things cleared and I could see well enough who’d been doing the whispering. They were right there in front of me, lying in piles around the side of the room. Maybe after all my splashing around in that passage I had water on the brain, but it seemed to me that they looked like the driftwood that piles up on riverbanks after a season of floods and storms. Trees stripped bare: all spindly white twigs and branches, lying on their sides, broken and intertwined.

Only they weren’t trees, of course, but skeletons.

Some of them had bits of cloth still on them, but most were nothing but whorls and spars of bone. They were a mess of bony apostrophes, commas, and exclamation marks brushed off some giant’s notebook into a tangled, ungrammatical heap. I could see skulls, and mandibles with glinting teeth, and ragged remnants of feet and hands, with most of the little bones lost or dangling. Ribs rose in spikes like clumps of shore grass, or broken racks for bicycles outside an abandoned station. In places the heap was thigh-high. It was a big, rectangular room, and the bones nested against all the walls, save at the far side, where a slab of gray blankness indicated another exit.

I walked slowly to the center of the chamber, shielding the candle’s brightness with a cupped hand. I did it out of courtesy as much as anything. So many bones…

And the proprietors of those bones were all right there.

Hovering above the bony driftwood hung a multitude of white shapes, almost like candle flames themselves. Very still and very faint, like teardrops falling upward and glowing with their own peculiar light, they had no definition except for dark round notches where the eyes should be. They floated there and stared at me. And as I stood in the center of their room, I felt the full force of their inspection, and with it their centuries-old misery and hate.

“It’s all right,” I said to them. “I understand.”

What had George said about the history of the prison? How it ended up being more of a hospital than a jail. The final inhabitants were lepers and people with other terrible illnesses. No one went there, everyone despised it. In the end the Tudor kings had driven them out and razed the place to the ground.

Driven them out…

I looked at the ring of broken skeletons.

Only they hadn’t actually bothered, had they? They hadn’t driven them out at all. They’d just trapped them underground and sealed them in, and pulled the prison walls down on top of them. Left them in the dark to die.

Simpler. Tidier. Solved a couple of problems at once. They were criminals and they were infected. Who was going to care?

Was it any wonder that this little room was the source of so much energy and rage?

“I understand,” I said again.

The shapes flickered, their dark eye-notches fixed on me, unblinking. I projected my sympathy outward as best I could. Whether they would comprehend the emotion; whether—if they did—they would readily accept it, after so long lying buried and forgotten, was impossible to say. So many hundreds of years, with no one any the wiser as to their existence….

Well, I wouldn’t blame them either way. I looked down past the dying candle and caught sight of something on the floor. I squatted down, not without a stumble (if only the floor would stop spinning!), and glared at it. It took me a moment to realize what it was—and that the skeletons were not themselves the deepest mystery of the room.

The flagstones where I crouched, unlike the corridor I’d come up, did not have dust on them, though dust was piled up thickly in and around the bones on either side. On the surface of one stone, not far from my left boot, something was lying, a cylindrical fragment, both white and brown. At first I thought it was a piece of bone, but as I lowered my candle close, I realized the truth: it was a cigarette end.

A butt from a modern cigarette….

I stared at it, frowning, head throbbing, trying to make sense of it.

Around me, movement. When I looked up, the ring of pale white shapes had moved inward toward me. I held up an impatient hand.

“All right, all right,” I said. “Give me a minute. I’ve just got something here.”

I stood up. Now that I thought about it, I could see that the whole center of the room was remarkably clear—of bones, of dust, of debris of any kind. It was like it had all been swept out to the sides. Someone was very keen on housekeeping. You’d think Holly Munro had been at work.

The thought made me giggle, and the giggle instantly woke me up. I frowned at the incoming ring of shapes. “You need to give me some space here,” I said. “You’re putting me off. Stand back a little, please.”

I went into the middle of the room, and after a moment to steady myself—everything was swaying in front of my eyes—bent down to scowl at the flagstones. I saw scratch marks in the stone, and here and there what I thought were splashes of candle-wax. I put a finger out to touch one of them, and almost fell over.

“You are seriously annoying me now,” I said. The glowing shapes had drifted closer and were no longer hovering above the mess of bones. Now they formed a circle around the edges of the cleared area. I could feel the force of their attention, the anger directed at me. “I’m not supposed to talk to you,” I said. “And I certainly won’t do it if you don’t step back. Go on!” The shapes retreated. “That’s better. What have you been doing here,” I said, “with all this wax and stuff? What are these circular scrapes? And this black burn mark here, right in the center? Have you been naughty? Have you been setting fire to something?”

The shapes said nothing, but echoes of the atrocity that had occurred here rose up black behind them; I could feel it welling above us, seething and dreadful, like a sandstorm about to snuff out a desert town.

“I’ll get you all a decent burial,” I said. “Proper coffins, proper rites. None of that furnace stuff. Don’t worry—I’ll talk Lockwood into it. He’s a little cranky when it comes to your kind, but I can fix it. Don’t worry. Lockwood will sort you out….”

At least he would if he was actually alive and well.

Out of nowhere, the thought came suddenly that he wasn’t. More than a thought—a conviction. What was I doing ? What was I doing, talking to ghosts when Lockwood had been pulled away into the storm? Pain lashed through me. My head pounded; I almost sank down to my knees.

Was he back there, under the rubble? Maybe he was! He would have come for me ages ago, otherwise. My fear lapped out against the edges of the room in great almighty swells. All at once I could hear the figures whispering together again.

“You’ll have to speak up,” I said sharply. “Like I told the old guy in the armchair, this is your big chance! People like me don’t come along that often. Speak up and speak clearly ….”

It was then that I saw that my candle was burning low.

That was okay. I had another in my pouch….Only, actually, I didn’t. Somewhere, back at the fall of rubble, maybe, I’d dropped it. No—I remembered setting it carefully down on the floor. I rolled my eyes at my own stupidity.