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

“No. That wasn’t me.”

“Then it is George…that little devil. Or I suppose it might have been Holly…”

“Lockwood.”

“Yes.”

I took a deep breath. “I went into your sister’s room. I looked at one of the photos—of you and your sister. I’m so sorry. I had no right to do it. And that’s not the worst of it, Lockwood. When I was going out, I fell and touched the bed and I heard…I didn’t mean to, I swear it, but I heard echoes, Lockwood, echoes of what happened, and I know it’s unforgivable, and you can do what you want to me, I’ll completely deserve it, but it’s been killing me ever since, and that’s it,” I finished. “I haven’t got anything more to say, and I’ll shut up now.”

More water, doing its sucking and flowing thing.

“Take another breath now,” Lockwood said. “I’d advise it.”

“Okay.”

“I should be angry with you,” he said. “I should be furious….” He turned the flashlight downward, directing it against the wall beside us, so that we were both picked out in discreet shadows, neither violently spotlit, nor given that creepy under-lighting that makes even the best-looking person look like a shambling Type Two. Not quite seeing each other’s faces helped right then, at least for me. Maybe Lockwood felt the same.

“It’s not that I don’t want to share that stuff, Lucy,” he said at last. “It’s just…too painful for me.”

“Oh, I know! Of course I know that. I—”

“Will you shut up for a minute? My sister was like you, you know, in a lot of ways. Hotheaded sometimes, stubborn, but faithful to a fault. She looked after me, and I adored her. But I was a kid, Lucy, and I was lazy and willful and all the rest of it. I just wanted to do my own thing, so I didn’t listen to her half as often as I should. On the night it happened, she was going through one of the boxes that our parents had left. You never knew what might be in them. She asked if I wanted to help. No, I wouldn’t. I was too busy outside climbing the apple tree, and messing about in the playroom, which is where the office is now. I was down there as it happens, by the garden door, when I heard her scream. I ran up—but it was too late….What happened after that, I can scarcely recall. Maybe you’ve got a better idea than me.”

That was the only time his carefully neutral tone wavered; and I was gladder than ever that I couldn’t meet his eyes.

“I destroyed the ghost that did it,” he said, “but what good was that? It was too late. And I felt…” I could sense him groping for the words. “Under the anger and the sorrow, Lucy, I was just left feeling hollow. Because I should have been in the room. I should have been there for her. And it’s not going to happen to me again. Whatever the cost, as long as you’re in my company, be sure I’ll always be there for you.” He moved the flashlight around to face the gap in the wall. “But I swear, if you go in that room again without my permission, or steal my Choco Leibniz, for that matter, I’ll never forgive you. And now perhaps you can hop through that gap first. It may or may not be algae this time, and I’d like it to be you who finds out.”

It was mostly water, as it happened; we proceeded slowly up the tunnel.

“Thank you,” I said, after a silence. “Thank you for telling me all that.”

“That’s okay. So now you know a little about how it began for me. After that, what option did I have but to become an agent? I got a job with a man called Sykes.”

I whistled. “Yeah, ‘Gravedigger’ Sykes…That’s a really cool name.”

“Mm…His first name was Nigel.”

There was a pause. “Why tell me that? It takes the shine off, somehow.”

“He was still a cool customer. The bane of Fittes and Rotwell while he was alive. He’d heard about what I did to…to the ghost. That’s why he gave me the job. So now you know.”

“Yes, only…”

“My parents? Oh, they’re another story entirely. A very long time back.”

I nodded. “Maybe you hardly remember them,” I said. “You were so small.”

“Oh, I remember them, all right.” Lockwood smiled at me. “They were my first ghosts. And look, I think I see the exit from the tunnel now.”

He pointed: far ahead a pale blue coin hung above the water, shimmering, as we waded slowly nearer, with the first light of the dawn.

So night bled into morning, and Lockwood & Co. emerged blinking from the darkness with its future changed.

The tunnel terminated beneath an abandoned wharf on the north shore of the Thames, a couple of blocks from the department store. There was evidence that the entrance had been carefully concealed: a large number of rotten posts had been propped against the muddy bank; some, sawn through and ingeniously attached to a kind of rough panel, had clearly been set across the hole to hide it from view. The way the panel had been cast aside suggested that someone had made a hasty exit, and boot prints in the mire supported this. Even as Lockwood and I emerged, however, the incoming tide was pooling in the prints, and soon they were lost to view.

At Aickmere Brothers, or what remained of it, much was going on. A DEPRAC ambulance had recently removed Bobby Vernon. The prognosis had been favorable, a sprained ankle and suspected concussion being the worst of it. Kate Godwin had gone with him to the hospital. The others were sitting outside the shattered glass entrance doors, shivering in the half-light and talking in muted voices to other agents, who were arriving in dribs and drabs from across Chelsea. Periodically, people would go up to the doors and peer in wonder at the ruined foyer. From a distance it looked like a doll’s house that had been picked up and briskly shaken by an angry toddler. There was almost nothing standing; everything lay formless and in heaps. In the center of the floor, startling in its vastness, a chasm opened to the buried rooms below. George and Kipps were grim-facedly fixing a rappeling line to one of the columns, prior to climbing down in search of Lockwood and me.

Our arrival changed the mood at once. Everyone crowded around, bombarding us with questions. I was patted on the back, grinned at, given high-calorie energy drinks, congratulated, scolded, urged to keep moving, and told to sit down, all at the same time. George offered me doughnuts, Flo Bones nodded at me with something approximating good-natured contempt. Even Kipps seemed relieved at my reappearance, though he immediately got into an argument with Lockwood about what to do next. He wanted to wait for Barnes and lead DEPRAC down in triumph to the underground chambers of the prison. Lockwood had other plans.

While they discussed the matter, I hung back on the fringes of the crowd, and so saw Holly.

She was definitely not her normal radiant self. By her standards, she was bedraggled. Actually, though, compared to me, her clothes were fashionably ripped, her face delicately bruised; she came within a whisker of making beaten-up look stylish.

Our eyes met. “Hey,” I said.

“Hello.”

“How are you?”

“Fine….You?”

“Bashed about a bit, but good….I’m glad you’re okay.”

She nodded. “So you made your way back in the end. I’m pleased.”

“Yeah.”

“I found something,” she said, “caught on a spike in there. I wonder if it might be yours….” It was my backpack that she had in her hand, battered, covered with brick dust. You could just see the top of the ghost-jar peeping out from under the top flap. There wasn’t any indication that she’d looked at it. Might have. Couldn’t tell.