Lockwood & Co. Book Three: The Hollow Boy (27 page)

The first drawer stuck, and I didn’t want to force it. The second was filled to the brim with tiny cardboard boxes of many shapes and colors. I opened one: a golden necklace, with a dark
green stone, lay on a sheet of cotton batting. His sister’s? No. His mother’s? I put it back, slid the drawer shut. The next was packed with clothes. This I shut too—more
hurriedly this time.

When I bent to the last, one of my knees clicked painfully—I’d jarred it jumping between trucks. The drawer was stiff, and very heavy; I stuck with it, easing it slowly out….

It was filled with photographs.

There was no rhyme or reason, no albums, no order. They were lying loose, packed in madly one on top of the other, as if they’d been forced. Some were torn and crumpled where they’d
gotten caught in the edge of the drawer, some creased, some upside down. The mess was so tightly jammed they’d become almost a single solid thing, and in the atrocious light, it was hard to
make out anything at all. Many seemed to be of foreign landscapes like the painting in Lockwood’s bedroom: towns and villages, wooded hills. Many, but not all.

The photo I picked up couldn’t have been that old, but all the colors had faded, leaving it a sort of yellowish-green. It had two people in it. The older was a girl with dark hair in a
kind of long bob. She wore a knee-length skirt and a white shirt with a frilly collar of the kind I remembered my sisters wearing when I was very young. Her face wasn’t as slim as
Lockwood’s, and the nose was different…but she had his eyes. She was gazing out of the picture with that calm, direct, black-eyed look I knew so well. It made my stomach turn over to see
it. And she was about my age, heading toward mid-teens. Her expression was serious and expectant, like she had something she wanted to say to the person holding the camera but was waiting until he
or she had finished the shot. I wondered what it was that was on her mind. Looking at her, I felt pretty sure she was the type to have gotten her point across.

Sitting on her lap was a small boy, much younger. She had her arm firmly around his waist. His legs were sloping to the side, with him leaning sideways, as if he was itching to be off and away.
In fact he was already moving, for the head was slightly blurred. Still, you could see the familiar dark hair and eyes. You knew who he was.

I replaced the picture and leafed my fingers gently down among the photographs, delving into Lockwood’s past. And as I did so, his voice sounded suddenly on the landing, loud, vibrant,
directly outside the door. A thrill shot through me, the terror of revealed transgression. I sprang upright, stepped back, and immediately stumbled over one of the low cardboard boxes on the floor
behind me. Even as I fell I knew I mustn’t make a noise; I twisted around, threw out a hand to stop myself—

My fingers closed on the wooden board at the foot of the bed.

I tensed my muscles, came to an abrupt and jerking standstill, almost horizontal, boots twisted behind the box, arm bent, face almost on the footboard. I stretched out my other hand and pressed
it palm down on the rough, tired fibers of the carpet, softly taking my weight.

And now there was George’s voice, replying to Lockwood. They were at their bedroom doors. Going to get some rest; copying me.

“Yeah, but we need to keep an eye on her,” George said. “Out in the field, I mean.”

“She’s stronger than you think. Don’t underestimate her.”

Holly, always Holly. The two doors closed. I allowed my body to sag across the box. When I was sure everything was silent, I did a half roll sideways, off the box, onto my knees, and grabbed the
bedpost to pull myself up.

How cold the wood was; I was much nearer the death-glow than felt comfortable. I thought of the black scorch mark hidden beneath the covers. I thought of the face of the black-eyed girl. Then,
like electricity arcing through a wire, sound crackled upward through my fingers, out of the past, through my eyes and teeth. And everything went—

Dark. There was a child’s voice calling in it, high and shrill.

“Jessica? Where are you? I’m sorry. I’ll come now.”

Silence in the dark. No answer. But something heard: a cold malignant presence, waiting in the room. I felt its anticipation. Lacking life, it was drawn to its warmth with powerful hunger. Very
recently, released from its prison, it had tasted life—and drained it clean away.

“I’m here now, Jess. I’ll come and help.”

The presence swelled in eagerness. Chill spread out from it, rippling against the walls.

“You needn’t sulk,” the child said. Footsteps on the landing. The sound of an opening door.

And then? A scream (the child); the cold presence welling up and outward (I sensed its triumph); a sudden twang of metal scraping; and then a sharper and more bitter cold—the cold of iron.
And then: confusion. A firenzy. A stabbing, slashing mess of shrieks and curses; a carving and a cutting, an evisceration; a spectral power torn asunder, swallowed up by grief and rage.

And then—

Almost nothing. The presence, in all its hunger and its chill malevolence, was gone.

Just a boy’s voice calling in the dark. Sobbing out his sister’s name.

“Jessica…I’m sorry…sorry….”

The voice dwindled away; the refrain (never varying, never ending) grew fainter. It shrank into the past and could not be heard. And then, when I raised my head, I realized that I could once
again see the pale light burning above the empty mattress, and my hand was still clamped on the wooden board. I pried my fingers open. It was dark outside the window. I was crouching by the bed,
and my knee hurt horribly.

Even then, in the desolation and emptiness that came afterward, it took me an age to gather the courage to get up, open the door, and slip out onto the landing. What if
he’d heard? What if he came out, right then, with the sounds of his sister’s death still tingling on my fingers and his child’s voice echoing in my ears? What would I do? What
would I honestly say to him?

But the door did not creak, and my footsteps made no noise, and I crossed the silent landing safely. I allowed myself a big sigh of relief as I began to climb the attic stairs.

At which there was a violent bang behind me, and a voice shouting my name.

Screaming Spirits and sudden visitations of the Limbless have frightened me less. I spun around, face contorting, body sagging against the wall.

“George! I was thirsty! I just went down to get a drink of water!”

“Yeah?” His fist was filled with papers; he had a pen behind his ear. “Listen, Lucy. I know what’s going on!”

“A drink of water is all it was, I swear! I ate too many salty chips at tea, and—Oh, you’re talking about the Chelsea outbreak, aren’t you?”

Behind the spectacles I saw it blazing, that old familiar fire. “Yes,” George said. “The outbreak. I’ve cracked it, Luce. I’ve figured it out. I know where it
began.”

“I
t’s amazing what you can come up with,” George said the following morning, “when you lie awake in bed. It’s such
good thinking time. I’ve been working with the maps, and the documents Kipps gave me—you know, the ones that list all the Visitor encounters in Chelsea over the last few weeks. And
I’ve been doing a
lot
of ferreting in the Archives. But it’s only when you lie there and let the information settle in your mind that you start to see the pattern.”

“And you have?” Lockwood asked.

“Oh yes, I see a pattern now.”

Breakfast time, and we were at the kitchen table. But the bowls and jam jars and sticky fragments of toast had been cleared away. We were suited and booted and ready for business; there
wasn’t a bathrobe or rumpled T-shirt to be seen. Holly Munro, coming up from her early morning vacuuming of the office, had caught the expectant atmosphere. She produced newly baked honey
biscuits from a tin and set them in the center of the Thinking Cloth. We had mugs, tea, and, in George’s case, a manila folder stuffed with documents. Everything was set for him.

It was fortunate, from my point of view, that his moment of inspiration had come now. It allowed me to relegate my experience of the night before to the back of my mind. Or try to. For whenever
I looked at Lockwood, so coolly contained and self-assured, the memory of that desperate little voice came rushing back, and set me squirming in my seat. Nor could I forget the echo of that little
boy’s violent grief, the fury that had instantly avenged his sister and—years later, in his every action—
continued
to avenge her.

Well, I’d wanted to understand him better, and now I did. Eavesdropping on his past had been effective. But as I should have expected, it didn’t exactly make me feel too good.

At least there were other things to distract me now.

George opened his folder and selected the topmost paper. This he unfolded and pushed along the table to us. “Here,” he said. “What do you think of this?”

It was a map of the Chelsea district, very similar to the one behind Barnes’s desk, only festooned with George’s indecipherable pencil scrawls. There was the Thames, there was the
King’s Road, and there were all the hauntings that had taken place over the last few weeks. Unlike the DEPRAC map, George hadn’t color-coded them. Each was marked with a neat red
circle, dozens and dozens of them. In some areas the streets were almost completely obscured by overlapping dots, which merged together like spreading stains.

We stared at it. “Well…” I said at last, “it’s spotty.”

“I looked a bit like that once,” Lockwood remarked, “when I had hives one time. George, I’m sorry. I can’t make out anything there.”

George adjusted his spectacles and grinned. “Of
course
you can’t. Which is just one of the reasons why poor old Barnes has got things so wrong. So—this is a summary of
every supernatural incident that’s been recorded in Chelsea up until a couple of nights ago. Impossible to see a pattern, I agree. The only thing you can hope to do is pinpoint the
geographical center—that’s Sydney Street—and hunt there. But we know that’s been a red herring.”

He paused to take one of Holly’s biscuits. Our fragrant assistant was listening to George with rapt attention. We all were. Despite his untucked state, his slouching posture, despite the
apparently leisurely manner with which he dunked the biscuit in his tea, excitement crackled around him like forked lightning. The charge had built up in him over weeks of solitary work; now it
sprang into all of us unbidden. He pointed at the map with a stubby finger. We leaned helplessly forward.

“One thing you might notice,” George said, “is the shape of the spotty super-cluster. It’s kind of like a squashed rectangle: narrow to the west and wider in the east,
like a shoebox that’s been stepped on. And the reason for
that
is the first clue to what’s going on here. First off, here’s the Thames: the largest mass of running water
in London. We know that no ghosts can cross it—so that’s the southern border of the cluster.”

“I think even Barnes knows that,” I said.

“Sure, but look to the north. See here, along the Fulham Road? What’s along here?”

“I know that!” Holly Munro exclaimed. “Iron foundries for the Sunrise Corporation! When I worked for Rotwell, senior management often attended meetings there. I sometimes went
with them. There’s a number of small ironworks there.”

“Exactly,”
George said. “And not just Sunrise. I think Fairfax Iron’s got some factories in Fulham, too. So the smoke that discharges from all those chimneys
settles over that part of London, taking with it tiny particles of iron. And that’s why spectral activity is blocked here. The super-cluster stops at this northern boundary.”

Lockwood whistled. “I see where this is going….So here in the west, down at the squashed end of the rectangle, there’s got to be something else, too, something plugging the gap,
stopping the contamination from spreading….”

And then I had it. “The Brompton lavender works!” I said.

We all knew the site. It was the biggest in the city, where they shipped in fresh stuff from the north of England and worked it into perfumes and ointments, or dried it nicely for cushions,
displays, and other home defenses. “But it’s down here at Sand’s End, isn’t it?” I went on. I pointed at a great bend, where the river turned south.
“There’s a gap between it and the Fulham ironworks. Why can’t the outbreak get through?”