Lockwood & Co. Book Three: The Hollow Boy (36 page)

He took Bobby Vernon from us, supporting him under the arms. “Well done,” he shouted. “I’ve got him. Get to the door, quick as you can.”

But this was easier said than done. The floor was being ripped away, and a cavity opening beneath it. It spread wider, like a mouth gaping, extending around the edge of the iron chains. And even
under
them. Boards fell way—a portion of the chains now hung down into the hole.

Lockwood grabbed Vernon’s arm, spun him bodily across. Beyond the chains, Kipps and George snatched at him, pulled him to safety. Next came Holly; she could barely stand. Again Lockwood
swung her across. She fumbled at the other side, almost fell back into the hole. George grasped her; beyond, Kipps bundled Vernon toward the door.

Now Lockwood turned to me. The fury of the air redoubled. Wood, earth, tissue leaves, pieces of fabric—we were lost together in a storm of whirling debris. “Just you, Luce,” he
shouted. His eyes sparkled; he held out his hand….

The floor ruptured. Boards burst upward, as if an invisible fist had slammed down. I lost my balance, stepped back, and the floor tipped away beneath me. Air caught me, lifted me up and
away—No, not far. I immediately jerked back, caught fast. My backpack had snagged on a broken spar of floorboard. For an instant I hung there, outstretched like a flag tethered to a windblown
mast.

Lockwood gave a cry. He reached for me. I saw his pale face. His hand found mine.

Then he was picked up and whipped away from me. I saw him spin off without a sound. I screamed, but my words were gone. Something behind me ripped and tore; then the backpack straps broke, and I
was blown free too, whirled out and up across the room like a cast-off doll. I collided with something hard; lights burst before my eyes. Voices called my name; they pulled me away from life, away
from all loved things. Then I was plummeting into darkness, and both my mind and body were lost.

Y
ou know it’s bad when you can’t tell if your eyes are open or not. When it’s so pitch-black, you might be dead or dreaming. Oh, and when you
can’t seem to move any part of your body, so that it feels like you’re floating as a ghost might float. Yeah, that’s bad too.

Utter silence doesn’t help much either.

I lay there. Nothing happened for a time. Inwardly I was playing catch-up, still running through a screaming storm of broken glass and wood and whirling clothes….Then, like a switch had been
touched, my sense of smell suddenly flicked on. I got mold and dirt and the bitter tang of blood, all at once, as if someone had shoved it all violently up my nose. It made me sneeze, and with that
sneeze came shooting darts of pain that acted like signposts in the dark. All at once I could tell where my body was, twisted out awkwardly, lying on rough ground. I was bent on my side, one of my
body arms pressed beneath me, the other flung out like I was one of those discus throwers you get on old Greek pots. It seemed to me that my head was lower than my body, and pressed against soft
cold mud. When I breathed, I could feel my hair shifting against my face.

Rather to my surprise, when I tried to move, my limbs responded without too much searing agony. Everything was sore—I was one big bruise—but nothing seemed broken. I half rolled,
half slid my body sideways, wincing as it collided with unknown objects. At last it lay on the horizontal. I curled my legs in close, pushed myself up, and sat there in the dark.

I put tentative fingers to my brow; one whole region of my hair was matted and sticky, presumably with blood. I’d suffered a bad blow to the head. How long I’d been unconscious was
impossible to say.

Next I felt at my side. Rapier: gone. Backpack: gone. The skull, with all its unnecessary and inappropriate comments: gone. Stupidly, I kind of missed it. There was an empty space in my head
where I felt its voice should be.

Part of me wanted to curl up again and just go back to sleep. I felt woozy, uncoordinated, and oddly disconnected from my predicament. But my agent training kicked in. Slowly, carefully, I put
my hands to my belt.

It was still there, the pockets packed and full. So I wasn’t helpless yet. I crossed my legs stiffly. Then I ran my fingers among the canisters and straps until I came to the little
waterproof pouch close beside the rapier loop. The matches pouch.
Always carry matches
. As rules go, it’s up there with the best. It’s probably somewhere around rule seven. I
wouldn’t put it as high as the biscuit rule, but it’s definitely in the top ten.

Rule 7-B, obviously, is to keep your match box well stocked. In the past I’d sometimes let that slide, but Holly, with her attention to detail, had always made sure it was stuffed full. I
could feel how crammed it was as I got it out, and felt a flush of gratitude, which immediately morphed into guilt.

Holly…

I thought of our argument, the way I’d laid straight into her, how my fury and stupidity had stirred the Poltergeist to life. It gave me a dull, sick feeling. I thought of her leaping over
the gap, and then of Lockwood reaching out for me—and the sick sensation in my belly deepened like an ocean trench.

The Poltergeist had caught him up and flung him away.

Was he all right? Was he even alive?

I gave a sob of self-pity, and at once swallowed it back down. I didn’t like the hollow echo. I also didn’t like the way my skin prickled at the sound. No more displays of emotion!
Wherever it was I’d ended up, I could already tell I wasn’t alone.

Presences watched me. The same presences I’d detected up in Aickmere’s—but closer now—closer and stronger. And also—somewhere very near, I thought—that
queasy, buzzing sensation, the one that had reminded the skull and me of the hateful bone glass we’d dug up in Kensal Green….

I rubbed my eyes. It was so hard to be sure of anything. My head spun.

I struck the first match. A teardrop of light swelled upward in the dark, illuminating the dirt-stained contours of my hand. Out of the matches pouch I took out two tiny candles, both short
white nubs. I put one down carefully on the ground, and lit the other, holding it at an angle till the flame took, and light waxed around me and I could see.

I sat on dark packed earth strewn with pieces of stone. At my side and back, where I’d been lying, lay a mound of rock and earth, and here and there pieces of jutting timber. There were
also scattered tissue leaves from the display tree, glinting red like blood, and burst lavender cushions, and forlorn scraps of clothing—shirts, dresses, even twists of underwear—that
had been sucked down with me into the hole.

Up above was a jagged snag of blackness. Whether it zigzagged up through a continuous tear in the earth and eventually reached the store above, or whether its sides had now fallen in, burying me
alive, I couldn’t tell. The light of the candle didn’t extend into it.

What it
did
illuminate were walls of carved gray stone. I felt rather than saw them stretch out ahead of me and arch brokenly over my head. I was in a man-made chamber, old and of
unknown extent. And at once I knew where I must be.

The prison. The notorious King’s Prison. George had been right, as usual: part of it still existed underground, and the Poltergeist, in its fury, had torn a way through to it.

In a way, it had done me a favor. This was where the focus was for the Chelsea outbreak: this was the Source—for Poltergeist, crawling figure, and all.

Speaking of which, not three feet from where I sat, bony arms outstretched, skull scarcely protruding from beneath the pile of earth, lay a skeleton. For an instant I thought that I must have
killed it in my landing, then I realized how ridiculous the idea was.

I looked at it. “Hello,” I said. “Sorry.”

The skeleton said nothing.

It couldn’t help its bad manners. I got to my feet, rather shakily, and took a few paces forward, nose twitching in the candle smoke.

Stonework all around me, rough-hewn and dank with glistening white mold. The walls drew inward; I felt as if I were being funneled toward something, drawing closer, step by step, to an
inevitable fate. It was not a pleasant sensation, particularly since everything still spun before my eyes. I took a breather, leaning against a wall.

I rested my head against the pitted stone. At once, sensations looped out of the past. Voices calling, crying, shouting for help. The passage was filled with bodies, pushing past me, pushing
through me, shoving, cursing. All around me, a stink of desperation and fear—I was buffeted, pinched, sent spinning into the center of the passage—

Where I stood alone in the silence, the candle burning low in my hand. My sensitivity was getting stronger all the time. I couldn’t even take a rest.

I stared at the wall. From floor to ceiling it was covered with faint scratches: letters, initials, Roman numerals. The marks of prisoners, who had lived and died here….

“Lucy…”

Out of the darkness, somewhere straight ahead—that voice!

I cursed under my breath. It figured. Well, I might as well finish everything at once. “All right,” I said. “Keep your hair on. I’m coming.”

Shuffling like an invalid, holding the candle first high, then low, so that I could judge the uneven ground, I proceeded down the passage. I took care not to touch the walls again. White roots
protruded between stones, and the walls glistened with moisture. Puddles appeared underfoot; for a few steps I was splashing through pools of shallow water, then the floor rose, and I walked once
more on solid rock.

I was at a cross-junction; two other passages extended out from my corridor, to left and right. The one to my left was immediately blocked by a set of metal bars, rusted, twisted, blackened by
age. To the right, my candlelight reflected on steps that disappeared into a solid expanse of foul-smelling, jet-black water. I ignored both side passages and continued straight on, and almost
immediately stepped out over a pile of shattered wood into a larger space.

Somebody was whispering up ahead. When I lifted the candle, the whispers went still.

“Don’t be shy,” I said. “Speak up.”

I laughed. They
were
shy. They were very quiet. The ground was tilting in front of me again. My head hurt, and for a moment my vision blurred; then things cleared and I could see well
enough who’d been doing the whispering. They were right there in front of me, lying in piles around the side of the room. Maybe after all my splashing around in that passage I had water on
the brain, but it seemed to me that they looked like the driftwood that piles up on riverbanks after a season of floods and storms. Trees stripped bare: all spindly white twigs and branches, lying
on their sides, broken and intertwined.

Only they weren’t trees, of course, but skeletons.

Some of them had bits of cloth still on them, but most were nothing but whorls and spars of bone. They were a mess of bony apostrophes, commas, and exclamation marks brushed off some
giant’s notebook into a tangled, ungrammatical heap. I could see skulls, and mandibles with glinting teeth, and ragged remnants of feet and hands, with most of the little bones lost or
dangling. Ribs rose in spikes like clumps of shore grass, or broken racks for bicycles outside an abandoned station. In places the heap was thigh-high. It was a big, rectangular room, and the bones
nested against all the walls, save at the far side, where a slab of gray blankness indicated another exit.

I walked slowly to the center of the chamber, shielding the candle’s brightness with a cupped hand. I did it out of courtesy as much as anything. So many bones…

And the proprietors of those bones were all right there.

Hovering above the bony driftwood hung a multitude of white shapes, almost like candle flames themselves. Very still and very faint, like teardrops falling upward and glowing with their own
peculiar light, they had no definition except for dark round notches where the eyes should be. They floated there and stared at me. And as I stood in the center of their room, I felt the full force
of their inspection, and with it their centuries-old misery and hate.

“It’s all right,” I said to them. “I understand.”