Jonathan Stroud - The Creeping Shadow

“You, too,” I began—but he didn’t hear me. He was still talking, telling me the plan.

“So I’ll cause a diversion,” Lockwood said, “that’ll distract everyone by the table. When they’re busy, you just walk straight past and into the room. Then you’ll have to be back out again with the skull in the blink of an eye.”

Now if it had been me making that suggestion, and I’d been putting it to Ted Daley or Tina Lane or one of the other lame-duck agents I’d worked with in my freelance career, there’d have followed a long series of questions as they tried to weasel their way out of doing anything remotely dangerous. But it was Lockwood making the suggestion, and me listening, and though my veins fizzed at the danger he was putting himself in, I didn’t waste time or effort. I only nodded. If Lockwood saw a way, I went with it. He trusted me. I trusted him. That’s how we stayed alive.

“Great,” he said. “Two minutes—and I’ll meet you back here. Then we stroll to the ladder and get out. Ready? Okay. Three, two, one—go.”

No sooner said than done. I set off, keeping to the curve of the wall. I slipped past the first few men in the line in front of me, ignoring their exclamations of annoyance. At every point I expected someone to pull me back. I drew nearer to the table, to where the Winkmans sat, surrounded by the men in black. And now I saw that there were two other men farther on, standing guard at a little arch, beneath the flashing neon light. At any moment I’d be spotted, and the enemy would descend on me….

There was a sudden cry behind me, a heavy blow, a roar of rage. Everyone at the table looked up. I could hear the sounds of repeated punches, rude insults, the shouting of the crowd. It was an almighty clamor. All eyes were on it. The men beside the archway left their posts and ran past me without a glance. Lockwood’s diversion was successfully under way.

Lockwood…My heart hammered against my chest. I was desperate to turn around, see what he was doing, but that wasn’t part of the plan. Without a backward glance I walked quickly past the table to the arch, and stepped through it into a small room.

Whatever the skull’s complaints, I didn’t think the chamber had ever been a ladies’ room. It was far too spacious. It was a simple tiled recess, once probably used for railway supplies, and now a storeroom of a different kind. In its center, a long trestle table had been erected; on that table, and in neat piles on the floor to either side, sat silver-glass boxes and jars of varying size, and each one of those containers was full. I glimpsed bones, lumps of ragged cloth, pieces of jewelry, the usual bric-a-brac that makes up supernatural Sources. But there were powerful ones among them; I could feel the psychic buzzing even through the glass.

Very powerful, some of them. There, in a silver-glass box halfway up one pile, I spied the Ealing Cannibal’s tooth collection.

And there, propped precariously at the end of the table, a certain familiar ghost-jar.

The ichor that surrounded the skull was thick and syrupy, but tiny pulses of green throbbed in its center, and the ghost’s voice echoed in my mind.

“At last! Am I glad to see you! Right, stab this guy quickly, and let’s be going.”

I didn’t answer. I needed to concentrate. I was not the only person in the room.

Behind the table, sitting on a plastic folding chair, was a man. A small man in a black suit with a dull blue tie. Those aspects I could instantly attest to. The rest was curiously vague; even as I looked at him, the details were slipping from my mind. He had nondescript brown hair, slicked back away from a bland, slightly shapeless face; he also had an expression of mild concentration; the tip of his tongue protruded from the side of his mouth. He had a cigarette in one hand, and with the other he was making notes on a piece of paper with a pen. But distinguishing features that would pick him out in a crowd? None.

Something about this overt and almost aggressive ordinariness made me assume that he was not the person I was looking for. He was a bookkeeper, an underling—certainly not the mysterious collector for whom the Winkmans toiled. But another part of my mind was jolted to sudden alertness. I felt as though I had seen him before.

Even as I made this connection, the skull’s voice came again. “Beware this man,” it said. “He doesn’t look like much, but he’s dangerous. Oh, great—I see you forgot your sword.”

The little man looked up and saw me standing in the doorway. “Who are you, please? You are not welcome here.”

It was a precise, finicky, almost waspish sort of voice, and now I knew I was right. It was familiar to me. A voice that dealt in figures and paperwork and bureaucratic details, as well as the qualities of the strange, unpleasant psychic relics on the tabletop before him. A voice that kept tabs on things, that reported on them to others…

“Who are you?” the man asked again.

I’d met him. Not so long ago.

“Fiddler, sir,” I said, giving a small salute. “Jane Fiddler. Mrs. Winkman sent me. There’s been a mistake with one of the items. That manky skull in the jar. We should have brought you a different skull, sir. This one’s a dud.”

“Dud?” The little man frowned over at the jar, then down at his jottings. “It’s in an official containment vessel. Old, too; it’s the style of jar used by the Fittes Agency years ago. They didn’t often make mistakes.”

“Did with this one, sir. The thing’s got almost no psychic force. Old bit of junk that needs burning, Mrs. Winkman says. She’s sent for the good skull now; it’ll be along in a minute. I’m to take the useless one away. She sends her apologies.” I made a sort of tentative saunter toward the skull.

“Apologies? From Adelaide Winkman?” The man rested his cigarette carefully in an ashtray and folded his hands over his neat little belly. “That doesn’t sound like her.”

“The mix-up’s caused all sorts of problems. Can you hear that racket?” I swiveled a thumb toward the door, where loud thumps and shouts could still be heard. Anxiety for Lockwood welled inside me, but I kept my voice calm. “Some of the boys out there are getting very worked up.”

The man sniffed. “How tiresome. You people really are revolting.” With an irritated gesture he picked up the piece of paper before him. It was attached to a plastic clipboard—and, with sudden startling clarity, I realized who he was.

Five nights ago, in the foyer of the insurance company. I’d looked down from the balcony, battered and bruised from my encounter with the ghost of Emma Marchment; I’d seen the Rotwell group, with Mr. Farnaby, my stupid supervisor, reclining in his chair. And at Farnaby’s shoulder, supervising the supervisor, clipboard in his hand…

The man from the Rotwell Institute, the soft-spoken, anonymous Mr. Johnson.

I reached the table, stretched out casually for the ghost-jar. “I know. We are appalling, aren’t we? Sorry. Well, Adelaide will be along in a minute to explain.”

“My mother will be along to explain what?”

And with that, my outstretched hand curled up like a scalded spider and retreated from the jar. Slowly, stiffly, I looked back toward the arch.

It would be a lie to say the doorway was blocked by a menacing shadow. Half of it was, but only the lower portion, because while he was pretty broad (and broader still thanks to the ridiculous shoulder pads on his expensive fur coat) Leopold Winkman wasn’t very tall. He had the bulky but diminished physique of a wrestler who’d been hit by a grand piano falling from a height, and the wide brim of his hat and loud checks on his designer suit only made him look more horizontal still. He was in his mid-teens, his face dumpling-soft and malleable, with a toad-like mouth strongly reminiscent of his father, the imprisoned Julius Winkman. Despite his soft and dandified appearance, his character was reminiscent of Julius, too. In the London underworld, Leopold had a reputation for precocious ruthlessness. His eyes were bullet-hard and blue.