Jonathan Stroud - The Creeping Shadow

It was no great hardship, walking with Lockwood through the countryside that spring morning. The air was clean and fresh, the birds were in business. It was a nice contrast to running or fighting for our lives. Lockwood didn’t say much. He was distracted, deep in thought. I knew the signs; the thrill of the chase was on him. Me, I was just happy for us to stroll together, side by side.

After some minutes we came to a place where a narrow track, cut into the steep bank to our left, led away to an open quarry. A neat cairn of stones and cut flowers had been erected on the grassy verge. It was topped with a wooden cross and a photograph of a man, now faded by rain.

“Someone ghost-touched here, maybe,” I said. “Or some accident in that quarry.”

“Ghost-touch, most likely.” Lockwood had a grim expression; he stared across at the exposed rock face. “That’s what everyone ’s dying of around here.”

We went on in silence until, half a mile through the forest, we saw ahead of us the brightness of open ground. Here Lockwood slowed.

“And now,” he said, “I think we’ll take to the trees ourselves. Just to be careful.”

By leaving the lane and pushing up the slope among the trees, we soon breasted a wooded ridge—presumably Gunner’s Top—from which we could look down on the land below. There were places where we could have stood out in the open, but Lockwood avoided these; he kept to the shadow of the trees, crouching as he advanced, remaining low, walking without a sound. I followed as best I could; at last we lay together, on the lip of the ridge, bedded by wet grasses, and looked down over the Rotwell Institute compound.

It was some ways off, in the center of a flat expanse of abandoned fields, ringed by low-lying hills. You could see it had been a good place for a battle, long ago; you could imagine the two armies massing in this natural basin. It would have been a spectacular sight—certainly a lot more spectacular than what we saw before us now.

I don’t know what I’d been expecting: some giant, gleaming edifice, I suppose, like a cross between the furnaces at Clerkenwell and the swanky glass-fronted Rotwell building on Regent Street. A big warehouse complex, at the very least, spotlighted and shiny, with dozens of agents scurrying around. But that wasn’t what I saw. The road curved away below us through the scrubby fields to terminate at an uninspiring collection of metal buildings. They were haphazardly arranged, clustered randomly together like a herd of resting cows. They looked like the sort of hangars that could be erected very cheaply and very fast: they had corrugated roofs and few windows. The ground between them had been leveled and laid with gravel. There were a couple of tall floodlights to illuminate the place at night; their drooping wires had a shabby and neglected air. A fence surrounded it all. The vehicles that had passed through the village earlier were parked just inside the one visible gate. No one was in sight.

“It looks…dumpy,” I said.

“Doesn’t it?” Lockwood spoke softly, but I could hear the excitement in his voice. “Yet the Rotwell Institute is clearly very busy there. Large, temporary hangars, slap-bang in the middle of an old battlefield. I wonder…”

“You think it’s the ‘place of blood’?”

“Maybe. You can bet all that old carnage gives them a head start with whatever it is they’re doing. Well, we can’t try anything in broad daylight. That fence doesn’t look like much, though. Bring a pair of wire cutters one night, and we’d be in….” Lockwood looked at me. “Care to risk it?”

“I’d give it a go. The skull might be inside.”

“I knew you’d say that, Luce.” He smiled through the sunlit grass. “It’s almost like the old days again.”

How warm and comfy it was, lying there—the sun was far stronger than I’d anticipated. I could have coped with staying a little longer, but we had to see how the others were getting on.

We found them at the inn, sitting in a corner of the taproom, and looking somewhat dazed. Their tour of Aldbury Castle had ended with half the inhabitants of the village emerging from their cottages to regale them with desperate stories of ghosts and hauntings. Holly had done her best to calm everyone; she had invited them back to the inn to give their accounts in an organized manner. Kipps then jotted down the details, and George marked each manifestation on a map with a neat red dot. The final person had only just gone, leaving Kipps with a stack of scribblings before him, and George’s map looking like it suffered from chicken pox. Three of the dots were ringed in black.

“Those are sightings of the Creeping Shadow,” Holly said. “Here in the churchyard, here by the old barrows on the far side of the village, and here on the green, where two little girls told me they’d seen a ‘big burning man’ walking near the cross. But the Shadow’s the least of our problems. There are so many ghosts here, Lockwood. I don’t know how we’ll ever tackle them all.”

“That’s what we have to decide,” Lockwood said. “Great work, everybody. Brilliant data. Let’s get some food, then we can try to analyze what we’ve learned.”

By evening, we’d created a proper nerve center for our operation. We had our supply bags ready, and our evening meal prepared. Stew had been offered again, but mercifully George had made a trip to the village stores, and brought us backup in the form of fruit, sandwiches, and sausage rolls. We’d commandeered a corner of the bar, as far from the Reverend Skinner’s fireside seat as possible, and shoved a few tables together to create a proper battle desk. In the center of this was spread George’s map, with Kipps’s notes alongside. We studied them. As Holly said, it was a sobering prospect.

“It’s going to take us several nights,” Lockwood said at last. “We’ll have to work in teams, and systematically go from house to house.” He looked up. “What was that?”

“Car pulled up outside,” Kipps said. “Someone’s coming in.”

Lockwood frowned, looked to the window. Even as he did so, the door opened, bringing with it a swirl of cold night air and the smell of lavender from the braziers burning in the pub garden. A big man stepped inside; the door clattered shut behind him.

Silence in the bar. We gazed at the newcomer, who had stooped to get through the door; now he straightened, his tousled fair hair brushing against the ceiling. He was a well-built, handsome man in late middle age, a striking physical presence. His chin was strong, his cheekbones broad and high. He wore an expensive suit, with a heavy winter coat, woolen on the inside, and a pair of green driving gloves. His movements were deliberate and unhurried; a heavy air of entitlement hung about him. Bright green eyes surveyed the room; they alighted at once on us. He walked in our direction.

We knew who he was, of course. There were enough posters of him plastered all over London. In those pictures, he was invariably smiling, mouth grinning as wide as the keyboard of a grand piano, emerald eyes twinkling, holding out some clever artifact dreamed up by the clever people at his institute. He was often arm in arm with a cartoon lion, too. There was actually something cartoonish about Steve Rotwell in person, as well, for he was a large man, thickset around the arms and shoulders, but rapidly tapering through the legs to a pair of small, neat feet. He had much the same attributes as a cartoon bulldog. I didn’t find him particularly comic, though, having once seen him skewer someone with a sword.

He pulled back a chair and sat opposite us. “Which of you is Anthony Lockwood?”

Lockwood had half stood in welcome. Now he sat, too. He nodded politely. “I am, sir. It’s good to see you again. We met briefly at the carnival last year. You might remember Lucy, George, and Holly, also.”