Jonathan Stroud - The Creeping Shadow

I scowled and hurried past. I’d once seen Rotwell kill a man by sticking a sword straight through his chest. The ads didn’t have quite the desired effect on me.

I visited the salt merchants, bought my supplies, and came out onto the Embankment again. Beyond the billboards, stone steps led down to the gravel, and here an unsavory figure crouched, a mud-stained burlap bag beside her. She was scraping dirt off a variety of pronged instruments that had been laid out on the Embankment wall. From the sun-blistered puffer jacket, straw hat, slime-caked boots, and the seabirds lying unconscious nearby, I recognized Flo Bones, a relic-girl of my acquaintance. Flo trawled the Thames shoreline for psychic jetsam washed up by the river, and sold it on the black market. She’d helped Lockwood & Co. on several occasions and was prickly, but decent enough, provided you stepped carefully and always breathed through your mouth.

As I approached, Flo was scooping gunk off a strange wide spatula-headed implement. She glanced up, saw me, and flicked a glob of muck over the wall.

“Well, look what the tide’s brought in,” she said.

“All right, Flo.” By her standards, this had been a pleasant greeting. She hadn’t flicked the muck at me, either, which was a first. “See you’ve been busy,” I said. “Any joy?”

“Found lots of rubbish. Two drowned rats, a pig’s head, and now you.”

I grinned and sat on the wall beside her. “Sorry to hear that.”

“Well, I was at a relic-man’s meeting half the night. Only managed a few hours’ work. Found me a couple of bones with faint auras, and a rusty whistle that carries some kind of psychic charge. That’s all.”

“Doesn’t sound too bad. You’ll sell them, then?”

Flo pushed her hat back and scratched at her hairline, the one clean part of her face. “Dunno. Got to raise my game these days. There’s a lot of strong items on the market, and the best of ’em are selling well. They say there’s a new collector in town, and the dealers are buying up everything decent.” She glanced at me with her shrewd blue eyes. “Guess who was at the meeting last night, snaffled all the good stuff? Winkman.”

“Julius Winkman?” He was a black marketeer whom Lockwood & Co. had helped put in prison the year before.

“No. He’s still inside. It was his wife. Well, his son was there, too, but it’s Adelaide who calls the shots. She bought up all sorts of weird and wonderful Sources at the show last night. A haunted painting, a bloodstained glove, a mummified head, a Roman helmet…” Flo spat over the wall. “Me, I thought half were fakes, but the kid vetted them and said they were kosher. Old Ma Winkman bought the lot. All going straight to this new collector. Anything good we find, we’re to bring it to the next night-market too. I’ll polish up the whistle, as best I can, but I’m not sure it’ll cut it.” She tapped her instrument on the wall. “So, where’ve you been hiding, Carlyle? Been ages. Barely been able to contain myself, not seeing you.”

“I’ve been working.”

“Not for Lockwood.”

“No….” I eyed the instrument. “What is that thing?”

“Slime flange.”

“Oh…Yeah, I’ve been working for myself. But I’ve just been with Lockwood, as it happens. Going to do a job with him. Only a one-off. I’m not rejoining.”

“No, well, of course you aren’t.” Flo picked up a sharper tool, thick with blue-black river clay. “That Holly Munro’s still there, isn’t she?”

I paused. “Actually, it wasn’t because of Holly that I left.”

She scraped muck off her prong. “Uh-huh.”

“I had other reasons.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Can you hold this muck-prong a tick?” Flo said. “I’m getting dirt everywhere.”

“Yeah….Now I’m getting it all over me .”

“Just need to wipe my hands.” She did so, on her puffer jacket. “There. That’s that done. Well, been nice seeing you, Carlyle. I’ve got to go. There’s a lukewarm kebab waiting for me in Wapping.”

“Lovely…Flo,” I said, as she gathered up her tools and shoved them in the belt beneath her coat, “this mummified head you mentioned. What was it like?”

“I dunno. Eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, the usual. Why?”

“Anything else? Just that I came into contact with one myself a couple of nights ago.”

Flo gathered up her burlap sack. She leaned over the wall, surveying the line of mud that ran east along the north shore of the Thames. “’S’not high tide for another hour….Think I’ll go that way. The head? Hard to tell the details, what with all the cobwebs on it. Man’s. Bit of a pointy black beard going on. I wasn’t paying much attention. It was in a silver-glass case; and, like I say, it was already spoken for. They said there was a powerful Specter attached to it. Winkman bought it for a lot of cash, I’m sure.”

I was frowning at her. “Do you know who brought it in?”

But with a wave and a waft of unwashed air, Flo Bones was gone. In moments she had skipped down the tidal steps and was crunching away from me along the Strand.

The Café Royale showed its broad glass front on the western side of Piccadilly Circus, where double rows of coffee-colored tables stretched beneath its brown-and-white striped awnings. An arc of brick-lined channels, cut into the sidewalk and filled with running water, gave it protection from restless spirits during the night; toward dusk, lavender fires would be lit beside the doors. It was a popular spot even after dark; in early afternoon on this late winter day, the place was almost full, the windows wet and steamy. When I arrived, weighed down with equipment bags and a ghost-jar in my backpack, I found Holly Munro waiting at a table just inside the door. She was reading a copy of the Times .

“Have you heard the latest?” she said, as I sank gratefully into the seat opposite. “Says here there are street kids following adults around in London. Late afternoons, on cloudy sorts of days, you know. They make money by alerting the grown-ups to ghosts. They tell them they’re being followed, that something in a white sheet is trailing after them, or that there’s a Tom O’Shadows dancing at their heels. The kids carry iron railings stolen from outside houses. Cash is handed over, then they wave the sticks around and send the ‘ghosts’ packing. It’s a complete scam, but they put on a real show. Hair-raising to watch, apparently, and impossible for the adults to disprove.”

I shrugged off my coat. It was warm in the café, and I was already hot. “Those kids have to make a living somehow. There’s a lot of poverty nowadays. We can’t all be agents, can we?”

“I know. We are lucky, aren’t we, Lucy? I’ll order some tea. The boys won’t be long. Lockwood’s fetching the bags from Portland Row, and George will be here soon.”

She busied herself making eyes at the waiters, and I sat back and considered her. It was her skin that always got to me. It was darkly buttery, with not a pimple to be seen. And her features, too—everything was in the right place. There’d been a time when her easy perfection drove me mad, and I knew that in my disheveled, wildly imperfect way, I’d done the same to her. To be fair, since meeting her that morning she’d treated me with careful attention and respect; but since the same could also be said of a gloved scientist holding a blob of plague bacillus on a glass slide, I didn’t read too much into it.

“How are you finding it, going solo?” she asked once the tea was ordered.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I get to pick my hours and jobs. I work with many different agencies. I make a bit of money.”