Lockwood & Co. The Creeping Shadow

We 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.

So that was the Old Sun Inn cleared; we’d rid Aldbury Castle of one of its ghosts, and we hadn’t been there a day. It put us in a cheerful mood. Danny Skinner, though bug-eyed at the sight of the bones, was delighted, too. After a late breakfast, he volunteered to take us on a tour of the village, to point out the other supernatural highlights we had to look forward to.

Our first stop was the church next door. It was a neglected-looking building of flint and brick, with a stubby tower and a vestry roof covered with a tarp. Its churchyard was clearly very old, surrounded in parts by a stone wall, in parts by hedges on a raised embankment of earth. The gravestones were of the same material as the cross on the green, and many were worn away, their inscriptions gone. Some hung at extreme angles; one or two had fallen. It was a peaceful place, if shunned and overgrown.

“This is where the Creeping Shadow walks,” Danny told us. “Little Hetty Flinders saw it here, with the dead rising from their tombs at its command. That’s got to be high on your list, Mr. Lockwood, sir.” Since our success with the Shining Boy, the kid’s hostility had vanished; he was our jug-eared cheerleader, marching proudly at our side. “Reckon you’d fix it, no problem.”

“You didn’t see the Shadow here yourself?” Lockwood stared up at the stone tower, where crows circled against the pale sky.

“Not me. I saw it up in the eastern woods, on Gunner’s Top. That’s where that lane goes, see? Half a mile straight, you get to the place. Had spirits following it there, too—the dead from this churchyard, most like. Pale, shapeless things, caught up in the Shadow’s burning cloak. Well, you’ll see for yourself,” he added, seeming not to hear George’s skeptical sniff. “You’ll fix it, you will.”

“I wouldn’t mind a word with Hetty Flinders,” Lockwood said.

“Can’t help you there. She’s ghost-touched now. They caught her outside her house, with her best blue frock on, poor thing. The other kids in the village’ll back me up, though. Shall we head on?”

As we descended onto the lane, the peace of Aldbury Castle was broken by the sound of revving engines. Four vehicles—three cars, and a small canvas-topped truck—had driven out of the woods from the direction of the station. They slowed to cross the bridge, honking their horns at a gaggle of geese that had strayed into the road, then sped across the green. The cars were black; the truck’s canvas side was stenciled with the Rotwell lion. Turning right at the Old Sun Inn, the convoy drove up the lane, past the church and into the eastern woods. Unsmiling men looked out at us as they went by. The noise faded. Clouds of dust slowly settled back onto the road.

“That Rotwell bunch again.” Danny Skinner spat feelingly into the grass. “On their way up to the institute. They couldn’t give a fig about us. They’re not a proper agency. Not like Lockwood and Company. They don’t get things done.”

“Quite so…” Lockwood was gazing up toward the woods. “Danny, I want you to continue the tour with Holly, George, and Quill. Show them the rest of the village. Lucy and I will just take a quick walk up to Gunner’s Top, where you saw the Shadow. I’d like to get a feel for the area. We’ll catch up with you shortly.”

Lockwood and I watched as the little party continued on without us.

“It’s not really Gunner’s Top you’re interested in, is it?” I asked.

“The woods? That’s just some trees. No, I want to see what lies beyond it, in the fields where this ancient battle happened. Come on.”

We took the lane below the church and followed it out of the village and into the woods. The lane crossed a narrow stream on a rickety wooden bridge; after that, as Danny Skinner had said, it proceeded more or less straight through the oaks and beeches up steadily rising ground. The woods still had its winter colors, its cloak of grays and browns; but here and there the spring rebirth was beginning—bright fronds breaking through the earth, the faintest green haze showing on the trees.

It was no great hardship, walking with Lockwood through the countryside that spring morning. The air was clean and fresh, the birds were in business. It was a nice contrast to running or fighting for our lives. Lockwood didn’t say much. He was distracted, deep in thought. I knew the signs; the thrill of the chase was on him. Me, I was just happy for us to stroll together, side by side.

After some minutes we came to a place where a narrow track, cut into the steep bank to our left, led away to an open quarry. A neat cairn of stones and cut flowers had been erected on the grassy verge. It was topped with a wooden cross and a photograph of a man, now faded by rain.

“Someone ghost-touched here, maybe,” I said. “Or some accident in that quarry.”

“Ghost-touch, most likely.” Lockwood had a grim expression; he stared across at the exposed rock face. “That’s what everyone’s dying of around here.”

We went on in silence until, half a mile through the forest, we saw ahead of us the brightness of open ground. Here Lockwood slowed.

“And now,” he said, “I think we’ll take to the trees ourselves. Just to be careful.”

By leaving the lane and pushing up the slope among the trees, we soon breasted a wooded ridge—presumably Gunner’s Top—from which we could look down on the land below. There were places where we could have stood out in the open, but Lockwood avoided these; he kept to the shadow of the trees, crouching as he advanced, remaining low, walking without a sound. I followed as best I could; at last we lay together, on the lip of the ridge, bedded by wet grasses, and looked down over the Rotwell Institute compound.

It was some ways off, in the center of a flat expanse of abandoned fields, ringed by low-lying hills. You could see it had been a good place for a battle, long ago; you could imagine the two armies massing in this natural basin. It would have been a spectacular sight—certainly a lot more spectacular than what we saw before us now.

I don’t know what I’d been expecting: some giant, gleaming edifice, I suppose, like a cross between the furnaces at Clerkenwell and the swanky glass-fronted Rotwell building on Regent Street. A big warehouse complex, at the very least, spotlighted and shiny, with dozens of agents scurrying around. But that wasn’t what I saw. The road curved away below us through the scrubby fields to terminate at an uninspiring collection of metal buildings. They were haphazardly arranged, clustered randomly together like a herd of resting cows. They looked like the sort of hangars that could be erected very cheaply and very fast: they had corrugated roofs and few windows. The ground between them had been leveled and laid with gravel. There were a couple of tall floodlights to illuminate the place at night; their drooping wires had a shabby and neglected air. A fence surrounded it all. The vehicles that had passed through the village earlier were parked just inside the one visible gate. No one was in sight.

“It looks…dumpy,” I said.

“Doesn’t it?” Lockwood spoke softly, but I could hear the excitement in his voice. “Yet the Rotwell Institute is clearly very busy there. Large, temporary hangars, slap-bang in the middle of an old battlefield. I wonder…”

“You think it’s the ‘place of blood’?”

“Maybe. You can bet all that old carnage gives them a head start with whatever it is they’re doing. Well, we can’t try anything in broad daylight. That fence doesn’t look like much, though. Bring a pair of wire cutters one night, and we’d be in….” Lockwood looked at me. “Care to risk it?”

“I’d give it a go. The skull might be inside.”

“I knew you’d say that, Luce.” He smiled through the sunlit grass. “It’s almost like the old days again.”

How warm and comfy it was, lying there—the sun was far stronger than I’d anticipated. I could have coped with staying a little longer, but we had to see how the others were getting on.

We found them at the inn, sitting in a corner of the taproom, and looking somewhat dazed. Their tour of Aldbury Castle had ended with half the inhabitants of the village emerging from their cottages to regale them with desperate stories of ghosts and hauntings. Holly had done her best to calm everyone; she had invited them back to the inn to give their accounts in an organized manner. Kipps then jotted down the details, and George marked each manifestation on a map with a neat red dot. The final person had only just gone, leaving Kipps with a stack of scribblings before him, and George’s map looking like it suffered from chicken pox. Three of the dots were ringed in black.

“Those are sightings of the Creeping Shadow,” Holly said. “Here in the churchyard, here by the old barrows on the far side of the village, and here on the green, where two little girls told me they’d seen a ‘big burning man’ walking near the cross. But the Shadow’s the least of our problems. There are so many ghosts here, Lockwood. I don’t know how we’ll ever tackle them all.”

“That’s what we have to decide,” Lockwood said. “Great work, everybody. Brilliant data. Let’s get some food, then we can try to analyze what we’ve learned.”

By evening, we’d created a proper nerve center for our operation. We had our supply bags ready, and our evening meal prepared. Stew had been offered again, but mercifully George had made a trip to the village stores, and brought us backup in the form of fruit, sandwiches, and sausage rolls. We’d commandeered a corner of the bar, as far from the Reverend Skinner’s fireside seat as possible, and shoved a few tables together to create a proper battle desk. In the center of this was spread George’s map, with Kipps’s notes alongside. We studied them. As Holly said, it was a sobering prospect.

“It’s going to take us several nights,” Lockwood said at last. “We’ll have to work in teams, and systematically go from house to house.” He looked up. “What was that?”

“Car pulled up outside,” Kipps said. “Someone’s coming in.”

Lockwood frowned, looked to the window. Even as he did so, the door opened, bringing with it a swirl of cold night air and the smell of lavender from the braziers burning in the pub garden. A big man stepped inside; the door clattered shut behind him.

Silence in the bar. We gazed at the newcomer, who had stooped to get through the door; now he straightened, his tousled fair hair brushing against the ceiling. He was a well-built, handsome man in late middle age, a striking physical presence. His chin was strong, his cheekbones broad and high. He wore an expensive suit, with a heavy winter coat, woolen on the inside, and a pair of green driving gloves. His movements were deliberate and unhurried; a heavy air of entitlement hung about him. Bright green eyes surveyed the room; they alighted at once on us. He walked in our direction.

We knew who he was, of course. There were enough posters of him plastered all over London. In those pictures, he was invariably smiling, mouth grinning as wide as the keyboard of a grand piano, emerald eyes twinkling, holding out some clever artifact dreamed up by the clever people at his institute. He was often arm in arm with a cartoon lion, too. There was actually something cartoonish about Steve Rotwell in person, as well, for he was a large man, thickset around the arms and shoulders, but rapidly tapering through the legs to a pair of small, neat feet. He had much the same attributes as a cartoon bulldog. I didn’t find him particularly comic, though, having once seen him skewer someone with a sword.

He pulled back a chair and sat opposite us. “Which of you is Anthony Lockwood?”

Lockwood had half stood in welcome. Now he sat, too. He nodded politely. “I am, sir. It’s good to see you again. We met briefly at the carnival last year. You might remember Lucy, George, and Holly, also.”

Steve Rotwell was the kind of man who sat with his legs wide, leaning back in the chair, in a casually dominant pose. He took off his gloves and tossed them on the table. “I remember Holly Munro. She used to work for me. And I remember the rest of you. You’re Penelope Fittes’s lackeys.”

Lockwood raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“Always at her beck and call. Jump when she whistles. Fittes’s lackeys. I know.”

“That’s an outrageous statement.” Lockwood glanced around, caught sight of Kipps. “Well, he was until recently, to be fair. But the rest of us are fully independent. Would you like a drink?”

“I’ll take a coffee,” Steve Rotwell said. “It’s been a long road.”

“Could we have some coffee, Mr. Skinner?” Holly asked. The innkeeper, who had been watching wide-eyed from behind the bar, jumped like a jackrabbit and disappeared.

“If you’re hungry,” George said, “there’s probably some stew.”

Rotwell ignored him. He unbuttoned his coat, with no particular hurry, and sat back in his chair surveying Lockwood. “Mr. Lockwood,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

“I’m drinking tea and studying a map. It’s not very exciting.”

“I mean here in Aldbury Castle.”

Lockwood smiled. “It may have escaped your notice, sir—you, no doubt, having many other things to think about—but there is a dangerous cluster of ghosts active in this village. We’ve come to deal with it.”

“Why should you come? You’re a London agency.”

“We were invited by the people of the village, who are in desperate need.”

Mr. Rotwell was one of those men who, having been considered important or good-looking in his youth, had never seen much need to indulge in smiles in everyday life. As a result, his face was mostly immobile. He said, “You know that Aldbury Castle is very close to one of my Rotwell Institutes. It’s on the doorstep, so to speak. We consider it our local patch.”

Lockwood, smiling blandly, said nothing.

“It’s considered common courtesy,” Mr. Rotwell went on, “for an agency to respect another agency’s territory. Their cases, their clients, their spheres of influence…There are unspoken rules we all adhere to. In such circumstances, I’m surprised to see you here. I assume that, now I’ve drawn your attention to the problem, you will be withdrawing from Aldbury Castle tomorrow.”

“I was given to understand, sir,” Lockwood said, “that your employees had been approached about the cluster of Visitors here, and had chosen not to respond. In such circumstances, I consider our actions eminently justified and reasonable.”

“You won’t be leaving?”

“Of course not.”

In the silence, Mr. Skinner approached carrying a cup of black coffee, with a little jug of cream. He set them on the table.

“Thank you. Wait.” Rotwell reached into his jacket, removed a wallet, and selected a crisp note, which he handed to the innkeeper without looking. He waited until Skinner had retreated, then curled a heavy finger into the handle of the china cup. He did not drink, but stared at the black liquid. “You have quite a reputation, Mr. Lockwood,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“A reputation for becoming involved in things that don’t concern you.”

“Really?” Lockwood smiled. “May I ask who says so? Have some of your employees or associates been complaining? What are their names? Perhaps I know them.”

“No names. The fact is generally accepted. This means,” Rotwell said, “that when I learn you’ve unexpectedly turned up near my institute, where important and delicate research is continually being done, I am concerned. I worry that you might be tempted to stray from the proper bounds of agency work and poke your nose into unauthorized matters.” He lifted his hand, drained the coffee in a single gulp, and set the cup down.

There was a pause. Lockwood stirred. “Did you follow any of that, Luce?”

“Not a word.”

“George?”

“Hopeless. Like a foreign language.”

“Yes, you’ll have to speak more plainly than that, Mr. Rotwell,” Lockwood said. “George here often uses big words I can’t understand, but even he’s struggling to follow you. What is it that you don’t want me to do?”

Steve Rotwell made a gesture of irritation. “You are here to deal with the cluster?”

“I am.”

“That is your sole interest?”

“Why shouldn’t it be?”

Rotwell grunted. “That is not an answer to my question.”

“Well, it’s all you’re going to get,” Lockwood said. “Mr. Rotwell, Aldbury Castle isn’t your ‘patch,’ your ‘territory,’ your ‘doorstep,’ or anything else. If you object to me helping to clear this village of its ghosts, you will have to make an official complaint to DEPRAC and see where it gets you. Until you do so, I’m free to act here. In the meantime, do have another coffee and tell me about this ‘important and delicate research’ that’s going on up at the institute. It sounds fascinating. Are we likely to see some new Rotwell products anytime soon?”

Instead of answering, Rotwell took up his gloves and got ponderously to his feet. He looked to the window, where dusk was advancing across the green, then started to leave. An afterthought halted him. Where he stood now, he blocked the light, casting Lockwood into shadow. “You’re a precocious boy,” he said. “I won’t list your talents—you’re evidently all too aware of them. What you lack, I suspect, is the ability to know when to stop. Because you, Mr. Lockwood, are an overreacher. I recognize that quality; in many ways I’m one, too. It means, I believe, that you will keep pushing the boundaries until one day you go too far. There are witnesses here, so I openly warn you now—don’t cross me. If you do, you will regret it. I say that to you hoping in firm good faith that you will heed my warning. But I don’t believe you will. You’ll cross me, because that is what you wish to do. And I will deal with you then.” He put on his gloves, buttoned up his coat. “In the meantime, good luck with your little ghost-chase. I’m sure it’s a job you’re well qualified for.”

With that, Mr. Rotwell departed. The door clattered shut behind him.

We all stared at the door. Then we all turned to Lockwood.

He smiled at us. It was a long, lazy smile, but his eyes glittered.

“Well,” he said, “the man’s an accurate judge of character, if nothing else. I wasn’t sure whether investigating what he’s up to was worth the risk. I considered it a fifty-fifty shot at the very best. But he’s settled the matter for me. We’re definitely going to do it now.”