Lockwood & Co.: The Creeping Shadow (32 page)

Maybe it was the light, maybe it was the stew, but I almost thought Kipps’s eyes had actually filled up. “I—I don’t know what to say….” he said. “This is…” He broke off, frowning. “But—hold on, if somebody’s invented these, why doesn’t everyone have a pair?”

That was what
I
wanted to know.

“The Orpheus guy implied it was a prototype,” George said. “Maybe it hurts your eyes, maybe it’s not actually that effective on most ghosts. We don’t know. I was hoping you could test it for us, Kipps. We’ve brought a spare sword along, too.”

“Even so,” Holly said, as Kipps placed the goggles reverently beside his plate, “can it be right that people are dreaming up important things like this—and no one knows anything about it?”

Lockwood shook his head. “In truth,” he said, “there’s an awful lot about the Orpheus Society we just don’t understand yet. We’re going to have to look into it. But we’ve got other things to worry about tonight.” He gestured at the darkened hall. “And the biggest of them is what’s going to come knocking on that door.”

After our meal, and bidding the Skinner family go to the safety of their rooms, we gathered our equipment and went into the hallway. Night fell, the evening progressed. We made certain preparations.

As midnight drew near, the atmosphere in the room grew heavy, and our vigil more alert. Lockwood lit the gas lamps. We watched their green flames flicker and dance against the dark-striped wallpaper of the ancient hall.

“This is pretty scary,” Kipps said, “but infinitely preferable to getting in a bed with Cubbins.” He had the goggles on top of his head; every now and then he pulled them down over his eyes and squinted fiercely into every corner of the hall. “Think we’re ready?”

“As ready as we’ll ever be.” Lockwood glanced up at the ceiling, from where the sound of slowly pacing footsteps could be heard. “All we need now is for the batty old fool to go to sleep.”

Unusually for an adult in a haunted house, old Reverend Skinner had reappeared several times during the evening, asking questions and getting in the way. He had finally gone upstairs only after eleven, and was evidently not yet in bed.

“He doesn’t trust us,” Lockwood said. “Just like he didn’t trust his own grandson. Wants to see things with his own eyes, which is ironic for a priest. Temperatures? I’ve got sixty degrees here.”

George was over by the stairs. “Sixty-two.”

“Fifty-three with me.” Holly stood near the fireplace. Kipps, by the kitchen door, had fifty-three, too.

“Forty-two degrees here, and falling.” I was sitting in a Queen Anne armchair to the left of the wide front door. A standard lamp with one of those mangy tasseled shades cast uncertain light on the flagstones. “It’s got to be a focus. Woo! See that?” The light had flickered off, then on again. “Got electrical interference, too.”

“Turn the light off,” Lockwood ordered, “then everyone come back into the circle.” We’d set out a big one with nice thick iron chains in the middle of the hallway. The feeling we’d had since arriving was that the Visitor here was strong. All our equipment was safely within the circle. Lockwood lowered the shutters on the lanterns, as George, Holly, Kipps, and I rejoined him. Dim light shone around the bottom of the stairwell from some lamp upstairs. Otherwise the room was dark.

“I hear creaking,” I said.

“That’s just old Skinner, wandering about upstairs. I
wish
he’d go to bed.”

Holly stirred. “Did you put the iron chain across the stairs, Lockwood?”

“Yeah. He’s safe up there.”

A little noise sounded on the front door of the Old Sun Inn. It was half knock, half scratch. We stiffened.

“Hear that?” I hissed. I always have to check.

“Yes.”

“Do we answer it?”

“No.”

The sound came again, a little louder. Cold air pulsed across the room.

“I’m guessing we don’t answer that, either?” I said.

“Nope.”

A sudden ferocious hammering on the old oak door. All five of us stepped back involuntarily. “Blimey,
someone
wants to get in,” George said.

“Third time lucky,” Lockwood said. “Lucy, if you could do the honors.”

Don’t think I was dumb enough to leave the circle at this point. No way. You get cases of Shining Boys (and, occasionally, Shining Girls), and by and large you don’t mess with them. They’ve usually been wronged, and they’re never too pleased about it. I was going to stay well away. So I picked up the cord that we’d tied to the door latch earlier and gave it a gentle tug.

The cord went tight. The door swung open.

Outside was that soft, deep darkness you get in the dead hours of the night. We could see the faint lines of the iron fence beyond the path. The stone doorstep was worn low in its center from centuries of feet on their way to or from the inn.

No feet on it now, though. There was no one there.

“Of course not,” George said softly. “It’s already inside.”

As if in answer, a faint light flared near the armchair, just above the floor.

“I see it….” Kipps had the goggles on. His whisper was stiff with joyous fear. “I
see
it!”

At first it seemed like a small fluorescent globe, no wider than my hand. It spun with other-light, slowly circling; as we watched, it swelled, took on the form of a tiny, radiant child with thin, thin legs and arms. The child wore a ragged coat and trousers; beneath the coat its chest was bare. It had a gaunt, malnourished face, and great round hungry eyes. All of us watching behind the iron chains suddenly found it hard to breathe; cold air stung our lungs, pressed on our skin like water fathoms deep. The shining child stood half in and half out of the armchair where I’d just been sitting, head bent, eyes lowered in a submissive attitude of shame or dejection.

It looked like a hapless little thing. My heart bled for it.

“I can hear faint sounds,” I said. “Like someone shouting angrily. An adult, I think, but it’s very far away.”

“Very long ago, you mean,” Lockwood said.

“It could never get past that iron fence outside,” George whispered. “It’s been in here all the time. The knocking on the door is some kind of re-enactment. It’s replaying whatever happened in this room.”

I’ll tell you how it feels, hearing sounds from the distant past like that. It’s like words written in chalk on a bumpy wall. They’ve been almost entirely rubbed away. A few edges remain, some scraps and fragments, but the rest is eroded and gone, and you haven’t a hope of figuring out the message. I guess it’s also like an untuned radio, emitting flecks of noise that you
know
mean something, but you can’t tell what. It frustrated me as I stood there listening: I
wanted
to hear what the child had heard. The wan little shape kept flinching, so I guessed there’d been violence in the voice.

“I’m so sorry,” I breathed. “I can’t make out the words….”

“Don’t worry about it.” Lockwood was busy loosening the canisters in his belt. Now and then he glanced back up to check that the Visitor hadn’t moved. “The key thing now is we find out where it goes. If it leaves the room, we follow it. What do you think it is, George, a Shining Boy?”

“Reckon so.” George had drawn his rapier; it gleamed coolly in the light streaming from the child. “It’s a Type Two, so we’ll have to spike it if it tries anything.”

“I
see
it…” Kipps said again. “It’s the first apparition I’ve seen in years!”

“Well, don’t get carried away,” Lockwood told him. “We don’t know what it’ll try.”

From time to time I saw the child looking up, as if snatching fearful glances at whoever spoke to it. These glances were directed at the fireplace, and when I looked that way I noticed that, unlike the rest of the room, which was lit by the pale, trembling radiance of the ghost, this portion remained dark. My eyes were repeatedly drawn to the black and narrow space, wondering who had stood there; but, like the words spoken by the angry voice, that knowledge was forever lost and gone.

“It’s moving,” Lockwood said. “Stand by.”

The child had drifted diffidently out across the room, veering toward us, head down, great eyes gazing at the floor. All at once its head jerked up; it raised its thin arms in a protective gesture above its face, and vanished. The room was black; we stood there, blinking. But it seemed to me that in the instant before the radiance went out, the stubbornly dark portion of the room had shifted, and borne down at speed upon the child.

“Think that’s it?” Holly whispered.

I shook my head—a useless thing to do in a darkened room, but there you go. “No,” I said. “Hold on….” The atmosphere in the room hadn’t altered. The presence remained. And, sure enough, now the glowing child was back in its original position beside (and in) the Queen Anne armchair, exactly as before.

“Replay,” Lockwood said. He suppressed a yawn. “This could go on all night. Anyone got any chewing gum?”

“Lucy does,” George said. “Well—one piece, anyway. I ate the others, Luce. Sorry.”

I didn’t answer. I was focusing my mind, trying to reach the child. It was a forlorn hope. To do so, I’d have to ignore the distant shouts, probe deeper into the hollows of the past, and also get beyond the psychic disruption caused by the iron chain. As always,
that
was part of the problem. The chain got in the way.

At that moment, a querulous voice—not loud, but by its unexpectedness intensely jarring—broke in upon us. “What’s going on down here? Why is it so dark?”

Our heads snapped around; a thin form was silhouetted in the stairwell. The Reverend Skinner—old, confused, reaching for the light switch.

“Sir!” Lockwood shouted. “Get back, please! Don’t come down into the hall!”

“Why is it so dark? What are you doing?”

“Oh, wouldn’t you know it?” George said. “He’s crossed the chain.”

I looked back at the shining child, which had suddenly changed posture. Gone was its forlorn, abandoned look. The head had turned; it was looking toward the stairs with new intentness. The eyes were like deep wells. The child began to move across the room….

Dazzling light burst upon us—harsh, electrical, and blinding.

“Aah! Turn off the light! Turn off the light!”

“We can’t see….”

“What are you playing at?” the old man said. “There’s nothing there….”

“Nothing that
you
can see, you mean.” With a curse, Lockwood jumped over the chains, ran for the stairs. I stepped out and, still half-blinded, threw a speculative salt-bomb on the flagstones in the center of the hall. Holly and George had done the same: triple starbursts, triple scatterings like snow.

Lockwood was at the wall. He stabbed at the switch—darkness returned.

And the radiant boy was right beside him, reaching out with tiny fingers toward the old man’s neck.

Lockwood fell on Skinner, protecting him with his body. He lashed out with his rapier. The ghost moved back, then tried to dart around the blade, its eyeless sockets staring. Lockwood and the old man collapsed back onto a nearby table, knocking into a tall and intricate model sailing ship made out of matchsticks. The ship spun to the edge of the table and hung there, teetering on the brink.

Lockwood’s sword moved so fast it could scarcely be seen, blocking the feints and darts of the ghost’s probing hands. George and I ran forward, blades patterning the air, seeking to create an iron wall above the table that the child couldn’t cross. The ghost was pinned in a narrow space between our whirling blades.

Now here came Kipps, his goggles glinting. He had a salt-bomb in his hand. He threw it hard against the ceiling so that salt came down upon the ghost in a fiery rain. The iron and salt together was enough. The ghost trembled. It broke apart and fractured into plaintive strips that hung there, dancing.

The model ship tipped over. It smashed into a million pieces on the floor.

The fragments of the ghost grew faint. Its radiance drew together into a coiling wisp of light that fled across the hall and sank beneath a flagstone at the entrance to the kitchen.

There was darkness in the room.

“
Fantastic
…” That was Kipps’s voice. “I’ve been wanting to do something like that for
years
.”

Lockwood flicked at the switch. “Okay,” he said cheerily. “
Now
we can have the light on.”

As case finales go, it wasn’t the most decorous we’d seen: a pop-eyed old ex-vicar, bewildered, bruised, and winded, sprawled over an ornamental table with Lockwood’s elbow in his belly, a letter rack wedged in his pajamas, and the fragments of a matchstick tea-clipper ship made by (as we later learned) his favorite grandfather scattered all around him.

It might have been even worse if we could have understood his breathless moans.

I took a stab, though. He didn’t sound happy to me.

“Oh, quit complaining,” I snapped. “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

“Yes, you’ve lost a model,” George said, “but you’ve gained an exciting three-D jigsaw. There’s always a bright side, if you choose to look for it.”

It’s safe to say he didn’t.

W
e resolved the case the following morning. With old Reverend Skinner confined to his room, Kipps and Lockwood took their crowbars and pried up the flagstone beneath the kitchen door. After half an hour’s digging they located a set of small bones, a child’s, complete with tattered fragments of clothing. George estimated them to date from the eighteenth century. His theory was that the boy had been a beggar, who, after having knocked on the door, was taken in by whoever owned the house and then robbed, killed, and stowed under the floor. Personally I didn’t think a beggar was a very likely candidate for robbery, but perhaps he’d been an unusually successful beggar. Up until then, anyhow. Whatever. It was impossible to know.