Jonathan Stroud - The Creeping Shadow

He started, cursed, rewarded me with a scowl. “What do you think you’re doing? I told you to go.”

“You forget,” I said. “I’m not part of Lockwood and Co. I don’t have to take your orders, do I? Anyway, you operate in a certain way, and so do I. You should know that by now.” I flashed him a Carlyle grin.

“Oh, God. Yes, I suppose I should.” He shrugged, then smiled; his excitement was too great to be sidelined any longer. He turned his attention to the door. “Well, I can’t see what’s in here, so we’re going to have to chance it. Get your rapier ready.”

But luck was with us, because when we pushed the door open a crack, gasping at the sudden psychic force, we saw no supernatural terrors or Rotwell agents; just the backs of many wooden crates, open, empty, stacked in piles. The floor was heaped with salt and iron filings, spilling out of the crates. Above soared a great high roof, glowing with pale light.

We’d arrived. The buzzing in my head that had bothered me since first stepping out of the inn that evening now reached its zenith. The din made me woozy; for a second I had to steady myself against the wall. Then Lockwood eased the door wider. Stepping through, we worked our way swiftly through the maze of crates until we came to the final stacks.

There was a narrow cleft between them. Beyond was brightness, movement, an enormous space.

We stood behind those crates, and looked.

“Oh my,” was all I said.

From somewhere, Lockwood had produced the pair of black sunglasses that he only used for the brightest death-glows, the fiercest supernatural light. He flicked the frames open, one-two, in a hard, sharp action, like the double drawing of a knife blade. He was exultant; the remorseless drive and determination that Kipps had criticized, that Rotwell had understood, that had swept me up since I first met him, shone fulfilled in Lockwood’s face that moment. It had led him to this.

“There it is,” he said. “That’s what we’ve been after, all along.”

Laughing softly, he put the glasses on.

How to describe what we saw in that cavernous warehouse at the heart of the institute? It’s hard, because even at the time the exact contents—what was and wasn’t there—were oddly hard to fathom. For a start, the space was mostly empty; except for our end, where all the crates had been shoved, there was very little in it at all. Metal walls towered over us; soft lamps clung to the soaring roof. It was like being in the skeleton of a great church, looking down the abandoned center aisle. A passage similar to the one we’d come through opened off along the right-hand wall. At the far end, dimly, I saw the double doors we’d spotted from outside, open to the night. I say dimly , for despite the place’s emptiness, something in the very center made them difficult to see.

Where we stood, the ground had been lined with a raised platform of wooden boards, but most of the building had no floor, just bare black earth. The grass that had grown there had long since died; the surface was hard soil, scattered with bones. This place had been the heart of the ancient battle; that was why it had been chosen. It gave the institute a head start with what they planned to do.

An immense circle of iron chains had been placed in the middle of the earth floor. It was wider than any circle I’d ever seen, maybe thirteen feet in diameter. And the chains themselves were vast; they were like the ones you saw at the London docks mooring ships to the harbor posts. They must have weighed a ton.

The reason for all this iron was instantly apparent. Inside the circle were Visitors.

Many of them.

Perhaps because of the restrictive power of the chains, they manifested only as pale gray shapes, superimposed upon each other and moving from side to side, like schools of fish in an undersized tank. Faint as they were, I could tell they weren’t Shades or Lurkers or other feeble Type Ones. These were forceful spirits. It was their collective energies that I’d felt all the way back in Aldbury Castle.

Their Sources had been piled up inside the circle. You could just see them, lying on the ground below the restless, drifting forms. I knew at once that these were the objects looted from the furnaces, taken from the relic-men, purchased and stolen and gathered across London. They had been removed from their protective jars and cases and placed inside the chains, to create a single Source of monstrous power.

The skull had to be somewhere in there, but I couldn’t spot it. Everything inside the circle was curiously hazy, as if light lost traction the moment it crossed the chains. The effect was almost like a thick column of mist blocking the center of the hangar, but that was too definite. It was more like a dullness of vision. You felt like you wanted to rub your eyes every time you looked at it. Mainly you just wanted to look away.

“What have those idiots done ?” I murmured. “What’s it all for ?”

Lockwood nudged my arm. “Look at the chain, Luce. It’s all about the iron chain.”

Not far from the end of our wooden platform, a metal post had been hammered into the earth. Attached to it, at about (I guessed) the height of my shoulder, was a length of medium-weight iron chain. This chain stretched away from the post, maintaining the same height, passed across the boundary of the iron circle, and went between the piles of Sources. What happened to it after that was curiously hard to see, owing to the peculiar light in the center of the room. It must have been connected to something, but what that was, or where it was, I couldn’t tell. The iron of this chain kept the Visitors in the circle at bay; the air around it, hazy as it was, was free of them.

The chain must have been of great significance, because the men and women of the Rotwell Institute who were present—I counted twelve in total—all stood near the metal post. Some had clipboards, and were dressed like the man and woman who had passed us in the weapons room; others wore thicker suits of protective gear, with plastic hats and oversized gloves. Among them was bland-faced Mr. Johnson ( his clipboard much in evidence) fussing around, checking their data, looking repeatedly at a stopwatch in his hand. There, too, was Steve Rotwell, decked out like the rest with hat and coat, but recognizable by his bulk, his glittering rapier, and his shiny shoes. He stood apart, drinking from a silver flask.

All of them just standing, waiting for something.

Lockwood spoke in my ear. “Someone’s in the circle.”

“You see him?”

“No. The light’s weird. But the chain provides a safe way in.” He bit his lip. “Well, safe- ish . Well, not that safe at all, actually. Whoever it is must be wearing some kind of protective gear.”

“What’s he doing in there?”

“We’ll find out. You heard what that pair said back there. It’ll be any minute now.”

As if in confirmation, the door from the weapons room clanged behind us; we saw the man and woman who had passed us hurrying back down to join their colleagues at the chain. The next moment, Mr. Johnson’s stopwatch had started ringing. The tinny sound made me jump. Johnson silenced it. Everyone watched the chain.

Nothing happened.

Steve Rotwell took another sip from his flask.

The iron chain gave a twitch.

As if jolted to life by an electric current, the Rotwell crew sprang into action. Men picked up spray guns, hoisted cylinders onto their backs; they stood in a broad semicircle around the metal post.

The chain was twitching furiously now. Within the circle the ghosts grew agitated, flitting chaotically to and fro. All at once they drew back, away from the chain.