Lockwood & Co. Book Three: The Hollow Boy (39 page)

“But it
is
, Luce. Look, I know I don’t talk about it, but it’s happened to me before. Losing someone dear to me. I can’t let it happen again.”

I stopped. Water was up to our knees; the meager flashlight beam showed a break in the wall, and beyond it, over tumbled blocks, an earthen passage. Lockwood gestured with the flashlight to
indicate we should go through, but I didn’t move. I couldn’t go any farther without—

“Lockwood,” I said, “I’ve got to admit to something. I’m going to tell you, and then you can switch the flashlight off and just leave me here if you want. Block the
tunnel in. I don’t care, and I’ll deserve it.”

There was a pause; water sucked and flowed through the gap in the wall.

“Blimey,” Lockwood said, “it isn’t you who’s been pinching my stash of Choco Leibniz biscuits from my desk drawer, is it? I always thought it was George.”

“No. That wasn’t me.”

“Then it
is
George…that little devil. Or I suppose it might have been Holly…”

“Lockwood.”

“Yes.”

I took a deep breath. “I went into your sister’s room. I looked at one of the photos—of you and your sister. I’m so sorry. I had no right to do it. And that’s not
the worst of it, Lockwood. When I was going out, I fell and touched the bed and I heard…I didn’t mean to, I swear it, but I heard echoes, Lockwood, echoes of what happened, and I know
it’s unforgivable, and you can do what you want to me, I’ll completely deserve it, but it’s been killing me ever since, and that’s it,” I finished. “I
haven’t got anything more to say, and I’ll shut up now.”

More water, doing its sucking and flowing thing.

“Take another breath now,” Lockwood said. “I’d advise it.”

“Okay.”

“I should be angry with you,” he said. “I should be furious….” He turned the flashlight downward, directing it against the wall beside us, so that we were both picked
out in discreet shadows, neither violently spotlit, nor given that creepy under-lighting that makes even the best-looking person look like a shambling Type Two. Not quite seeing each other’s
faces helped right then, at least for me. Maybe Lockwood felt the same.

“It’s not that I don’t want to share that stuff, Lucy,” he said at last. “It’s just…too painful for me.”

“Oh, I know! Of
course
I know that. I—”

“Will you shut up for a minute? My sister was like you, you know, in a lot of ways. Hotheaded sometimes, stubborn, but faithful to a fault. She looked after me, and I adored her. But I was
a kid, Lucy, and I was lazy and willful and all the rest of it. I just wanted to do my own thing, so I didn’t listen to her half as often as I should. On the night it happened, she was going
through one of the boxes that our parents had left. You never knew what might be in them. She asked if I wanted to help. No, I wouldn’t. I was too busy outside climbing the apple tree, and
messing about in the playroom, which is where the office is now. I was down there as it happens, by the garden door, when I heard her scream. I ran up—but it was too late….What happened
after that, I can scarcely recall. Maybe
you’ve
got a better idea than me.”

That was the only time his carefully neutral tone wavered; and I was gladder than ever that I couldn’t meet his eyes.

“I destroyed the ghost that did it,” he said, “but what good was that? It was too late. And I felt…” I could sense him groping for the words. “Under the anger and
the sorrow, Lucy, I was just left feeling hollow. Because I should have been in the room. I should have been there for her. And it’s not going to happen to me again. Whatever the cost, as
long as you’re in my company, be sure I’ll always be there for you.” He moved the flashlight around to face the gap in the wall. “But I swear, if you go in that room again
without my permission, or steal my Choco Leibniz, for that matter, I’ll never forgive you. And now perhaps you can hop through that gap first. It may or may not be algae this time, and
I’d like it to be you who finds out.”

It was mostly water, as it happened; we proceeded slowly up the tunnel.

“Thank you,” I said, after a silence. “Thank you for telling me all that.”

“That’s okay. So now you know a little about how it began for me. After that, what option did I have but to become an agent? I got a job with a man called Sykes.”

I whistled. “Yeah, ‘Gravedigger’ Sykes…That’s a really cool name.”

“Mm…His first name was Nigel.”

There was a pause. “Why tell me that? It takes the shine off, somehow.”

“He was still a cool customer. The bane of Fittes and Rotwell while he was alive. He’d heard about what I did to…to the ghost. That’s why he gave me the job. So now you
know.”

“Yes, only…”

“My parents? Oh, they’re another story entirely. A
very
long time back.”

I nodded. “Maybe you hardly remember them,” I said. “You were so small.”

“Oh, I remember them, all right.” Lockwood smiled at me. “They were my first ghosts. And look, I think I see the exit from the tunnel now.”

He pointed: far ahead a pale blue coin hung above the water, shimmering, as we waded slowly nearer, with the first light of the dawn.

S
o night bled into morning, and Lockwood & Co. emerged blinking from the darkness with its future changed.

The tunnel terminated beneath an abandoned wharf on the north shore of the Thames, a couple of blocks from the department store. There was evidence that the entrance had been carefully
concealed: a large number of rotten posts had been propped against the muddy bank; some, sawn through and ingeniously attached to a kind of rough panel, had clearly been set across the hole to hide
it from view. The way the panel had been cast aside suggested that someone had made a hasty exit, and boot prints in the mire supported this. Even as Lockwood and I emerged, however, the incoming
tide was pooling in the prints, and soon they were lost to view.

At Aickmere Brothers, or what remained of it, much was going on. A DEPRAC ambulance had recently removed Bobby Vernon. The prognosis had been favorable, a sprained ankle and suspected concussion
being the worst of it. Kate Godwin had gone with him to the hospital. The others were sitting outside the shattered glass entrance doors, shivering in the half-light and talking in muted voices to
other agents, who were arriving in dribs and drabs from across Chelsea. Periodically, people would go up to the doors and peer in wonder at the ruined foyer. From a distance it looked like a
doll’s house that had been picked up and briskly shaken by an angry toddler. There was almost nothing standing; everything lay formless and in heaps. In the center of the floor, startling in
its vastness, a chasm opened to the buried rooms below. George and Kipps were grim-facedly fixing a rappeling line to one of the columns, prior to climbing down in search of Lockwood and me.

Our arrival changed the mood at once. Everyone crowded around, bombarding us with questions. I was patted on the back, grinned at, given high-calorie energy drinks, congratulated, scolded, urged
to keep moving, and told to sit down, all at the same time. George offered me doughnuts, Flo Bones nodded at me with something approximating good-natured contempt. Even Kipps seemed relieved at my
reappearance, though he immediately got into an argument with Lockwood about what to do next. He wanted to wait for Barnes and lead DEPRAC down in triumph to the underground chambers of the prison.
Lockwood had other plans.

While they discussed the matter, I hung back on the fringes of the crowd, and so saw Holly.

She was definitely not her normal radiant self. By her standards, she was bedraggled. Actually, though, compared to me, her clothes were fashionably ripped, her face delicately bruised; she came
within a whisker of making beaten-up look stylish.

Our eyes met. “Hey,” I said.

“Hello.”

“How are you?”

“Fine….You?”

“Bashed about a bit, but good….I’m glad you’re okay.”

She nodded. “So you made your way back in the end. I’m pleased.”

“Yeah.”

“I found something,” she said, “caught on a spike in there. I wonder if it might be yours….” It was my backpack that she had in her hand, battered, covered with brick
dust. You could just see the top of the ghost-jar peeping out from under the top flap. There wasn’t any indication that she’d looked at it. Might have. Couldn’t tell.

I took it from her. “Thanks,” I said.

“No problem.”

Let’s face it, it wasn’t the most thrilling conversation you’ll ever hear; not exactly one to be carved on your tombstone or strung up in lights over your front door. But it
was good enough for me. Because, for once, there wasn’t a subtext to it. No hidden agenda. It was weary, wary, and cautiously forgiving. It was what it was, basically, and that was a
start.

Lockwood won the argument with Kipps. He at once sent George back to the wharf to locate the hidden entrance, and then to find and survey the secret room of bones. George lost no time. Flo
Bones, perhaps because she felt that anything associated with the riverbank was more her business than anyone else’s, went with him.

Not long after that, Inspector Barnes arrived.

He came in a squad car, with four DEPRAC vans accompanying him. The agents who filed out from the first three—a motley crew of gray-faced kids from the Grimble, Tamworth, and Atkins and
Armstrong agencies, who’d been up all night fighting Visitors in Chelsea—weren’t much good for anything. They’d have had trouble dealing with a Lurker or a Tom
O’Shadows between them. But the fancy-suited, stony-faced men and women who issued from the fourth van were a different matter. They didn’t wear DEPRAC uniforms, or any visible symbol
of an agency. They looked both narrow-eyed and watchful. I wondered if these were the advisors Kipps had mentioned; the ones who’d been telling Barnes what to do.

Certainly Barnes’s mustache looked ragged in the early morning light; he had a beleaguered, feral air, as of one who hasn’t slept, or washed, for quite some time. With his suited
associates standing in the background, he rounded on us instantly, accusing us of a host of misdemeanors—wasting police time, misleadingly claiming to be on official DEPRAC business, and
wanton destruction of public property.

He mentioned this last one before he’d had a chance to look inside the building. The glass sprinkling the sidewalk was all he’d seen. When he at last drew breath, Kipps jerked his
thumb toward the foyer. “You don’t know the half of it yet. Take a look in there.”

Barnes did so; his jaw sagged. He clutched at the revolving door for support. Part of it promptly fell off and landed on his toe.

“What have you
done
?” he gasped. “I buy my socks from here!”

“You’ll see we found the focus of the Chelsea hauntings,” Lockwood said cheerily. “It
would
have been easier if you’d given us a few more personnel to help
us, Mr. Barnes, but I have to say that Quill Kipps and his team have done a first-class job. It was very good of you to let them join us.” Here Lockwood glanced fleetingly toward the watching
men and women in their dark suits. “The short account of it is that we fought off the strongest Poltergeist I’ve ever encountered, and in so doing discovered the remains of the
long-lost King’s Prison hidden underground. Lucy Carlyle went in and discovered a
lot
of unburied skeletons—I think you’ll find this is the original Source of the Chelsea
outbreak. Anyway, George Cubbins has the details of how it spread. He can show you presently.”

An unprepossessing scene followed, in which Barnes attempted to save face by backtracking a bit on his earlier criticisms, pretending that he
had
in fact had something to do with our
expedition, while at the same time questioning us aggressively about what had actually happened. You could see the panic and distrust flaring in his pouchy eyes.

At last one of the women spoke. “These skeletons. How do we get to them?”

“It’s not easy, I’m afraid.” Lockwood pointed at the crack in the foyer floor. “It takes quite a bit of squeezing down. You might want to come back later with a
properly equipped team.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” the woman said.

“I’m sure you will.” Lockwood gave her his most gleaming smile. “Who actually
are
you? You’re not the cleaning staff, I hope? If so, you’re going to
need a hefty broom.”

Judging by her reaction, the woman wasn’t the cleaning staff. In the course of the loud words that followed, none of us chose to mention the existence of the tunnel under the wharf. The
aim was to give George and Flo more time.

In the middle of all this, a chauffeured car pulled up. It was none other than Mr. Aickmere himself, freshly Brylcreemed and shiny-new, coming to inspect his store and check that none of his
precious displays had been disturbed by our nocturnal activities. Noticing the broken glass beside the entrance, he at once accosted Barnes with shrill, indignant cries. The inspector, taken by
surprise, could not prevent him from approaching the foyer, and so glimpsing the devastation within. Mr. Aickmere’s response was emphatic, not to say violent, and soon the men and women in
gray suits were rushing to Barnes’s aid. Lockwood, Kipps, Holly, and I exchanged quick looks; we judged this to be a good time to slip away.