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

Lockwood crunched the cucumber. “As always, Barnes follows his own agenda.”

“He’s not the only one.” George gave the paper a prod. “I’m not sure I approve of Kipps getting equal billing with you here.”

“Oh, that’s just to keep him sweet. To be honest, we do owe him for supporting us, and it’s paid off for him now. Did you hear he’s been promoted? Section leader or something, wasn’t it, Luce? You’re the one who told me.”

“Yeah, Fittes Division Leader,” I said.

“That’s it. Awarded by Penelope Fittes herself. Still, that didn’t prevent Kipps from having a massive fight with me about the way we handled the Room of Bones at the end. He was furious that the Rotwell team got there before anyone from his agency.”

“Well, you didn’t tell them to go in, did you?” George said.

“No. I don’t know who did, actually. I suppose it must have been Barnes….” All at once, Lockwood fixed me with his dark eyes. “Are you all right, Lucy?” he asked.

“Yes! Yes….” He’d startled me; I’d been drifting. Just for a moment the living Lockwood, sitting at the table, cutting himself a piece of Holly’s trendy delicatessen cheese, had been lost, hidden beneath the gory, white-faced apparition of the underground room….

I blinked the mirage away. It was fake! I knew it was. I knew it was a lie. I’d seen Lockwood himself slice the Fetch in two just as cleanly as he did that cheese.

But try as I might, I couldn’t shake my mind clear.

I show you the future. This is your doing.

“Have a piece of Parma ham, Lucy,” Holly said. “Lockwood likes it. It’ll really put the blood back in your cheeks.”

“Er, yeah, sure—thanks.”

Holly and me? We’d adopted a mutual policy of careful toleration. Over the last few days, for want of anything better, we’d kind of muddled by. Don’t get me wrong—we still riled each other. Her new habit of sweeping up crumbs around my plate while I was eating , for example—that got my goat. Meanwhile, she was less than thrilled by my (justifiable) habit of rolling my eyes and gasping aloud whenever she did something especially finicky, precious, or controlling. But things didn’t threaten to ignite the way they once had. Perhaps it was because we’d already said everything there was to say, that awful night at Aickmere’s. Or perhaps it was simply because we no longer had the energy to be furious anymore.

“Speaking of the Room of Bones,” George said, as he moved his plate of ciabatta crusts to one side, “I’d like to show you something, courtesy of the noble Thinking Cloth.” In front of him was his diagram, multicolored and carefully inscribed. Imagine a square with a circle inside it, and inside that circle nine precisely arranged dots. Right in the middle of that , another small circle, crosshatched in black, with several thin, spidery pencil lines radiating from opposite sides of it like broken bicycle spokes. On one side of the circle stretched a long red stain.

George smoothed out the cloth. “This is my plan of the room,” he said, “taken from the measurements Flo and I noted down the other day. Lucy and Lockwood were absolutely right. Someone else was here, and they were doing something very specific. Look how the skeletons were pushed back to form a kind of perfect circle around the edges. I know they weren’t originally like that, because I found bone fragments in the center of the room. Someone carefully arranged them that way. They then rigged up nine candles in a ring: the wax marks show how these were positioned. After that, something happened in the middle of the room, right here.” He pointed to the crosshatched circle. “It’s an ectoplasm burn. I studied it particularly closely. The stones there were still very cold. The burn reminds me of others we’ve seen, where something otherworldly came through.”

He didn’t mention it, none of us did: but there was an example of a burn like that in our very house, on the mattress in the abandoned room upstairs.

“Interesting,” Lockwood breathed. “And what’s this sinister red stain?”

“That’s some jam from breakfast this morning.” George pushed his glasses up his nose. “But check these out.” He pointed to the pencil marks radiating from the center. “The lines mark the position of a number of odd scrapes and scuff marks on the floor. They’re very odd.”

“Maybe where the bones were being dragged?” Lockwood suggested.

“It’s possible. But to me they look more like they were made by metal.” He chuckled. “Like that time I pulled those chains across the office floor, Lockwood, and left scratches on the wood?”

Lockwood frowned. “Yes…you still haven’t revarnished that.”

“You know what it reminds me of?” I said slowly. I felt sluggish; a weight pressed down on me. It was all I could do to speak. “The diagram as a whole, I mean?”

“I think I know what you’re going to say,” George said. “And yes, I agree.”

“The bone glass from Kensal Green. Obviously it was much smaller, but it had a bony perimeter too, arranged in a kind of circle. There’s no mirror or lens or anything here, I know, but…”

“Unless someone brought one in,” Lockwood said.

“When I was up in the department store,” I went on, “I could feel a kind of…psychic buzzing—a disturbance, if you like, which reminded me of the bone glass. Only it was gone when I actually got down to the room of bones.”

“I wonder…” George said. “Maybe they were still at work down there when we first turned up. Maybe, Luce, you only just missed them.”

“That’s quite a creepy thought,” Lockwood said, and oddly, since it involved meeting the living, not the dead, I found he was quite right. “Seems your earlier theory was correct, anyway, George,” he said. “The spirits of the prison were stirred up by this weird activity, and that caused a ripple effect out across Chelsea. Flo swears the tunnel entrance wasn’t there a few months ago, so it’s very recent. I wonder what they were doing, and what they got out of it….And who they were.”

“We’ve got that cigarette butt you found,” George said. “I took it to a tobacconist friend of mine. He says it’s a Persian Light, quite an exclusive brand. But where that leaves us, I don’t know. I didn’t have time to find any other clues. It’s just a shame those Rotwell agents took everything apart so fast.”

Lockwood nodded. “Yes, isn’t it? What do you think, Holly?”

“I still think that cloth is an eyesore,” Holly said. “I don’t know why you don’t use pieces of paper, which I could then file away nicely. Look at the way you’ve got jam all over your drawing, George.” She picked up a plate. “Right, who wants more hummus sandwiches?”

“Only a couple more for me,” George said. “I’m saving myself for that whopping chocolate cake at the end.”

Lockwood took a sandwich. “Penny for your thoughts, Lucy. You’ve been really quiet today.”

It was true; over the last few days a new understanding had settled over me, slowly, softly, like a blanket or feather eiderdown. Its force was gentle, yet I buckled under the implications. Words weren’t so easy to come by, then.

“I was just wondering,” I said, in a small voice. “Do you think any ghost can show the future? I mean, obviously they show the past , mostly. That’s what they’re made of. But if Fetches—or other kinds of Visitor—can burrow into people’s minds and sift their thoughts, which they seem to, could they possibly do other stuff? Like make predictions about what’s to come?”

They gazed at me. “Blimey,” George said. “You do realize that the profoundest thing I’ve been wondering this afternoon is how many chips I can possibly stuff in.”