Lockwood & Co. The Hollow Boy

Too late for anything, but we gave it a go.

No sooner had the tape dispenser hit the glass than Holly and I dived behind the nearest available shelter. It was a low display case, like a kind of open-topped table, stuffed with a hundred varieties of golf socks. Holly and I crouched there, bent close, our faces nearly touching. Bobby Vernon was crumpled between us, half-conscious, breathing heavily.

It was very quiet in the room now. True, the psychic echo of our argument rebounded between the walls, on and on and on. Invisible lines of power thrummed in the room, taut as piano wire, heavy with built-up charge. But the only actual sound was a soft, rhythmic rustling. I peeped up from behind the case and looked over at the desk, at the counter with its jagged crack and the tape dispenser sticking up from the fractured glass like the bow of a sinking ship.

A little stack of papers—brochures, maybe—lay on the glass. One corner of the stack was riffling in a nonexistent wind.

The pages would ripple upward, then fall still, then ripple up again.

I ducked back down.

“Can you see anything?” Holly asked. The terror was plain in her eyes. Her voice shook with the effort of trying to rebuild her shattered emotional calm. I nodded.

She stared at me. A twist of hair had fallen in front of her face; she was chewing the end, eyes wide in the half-dark. “So…so the Fittes Manual says the first thing we have to do is establish Type,” she said.

I knew quite well what the Fittes Manual said. But damp fear had replaced the remains of anger in my belly. I just nodded again. “Yes.”

“We know it’s kinetic,” she breathed. “It moves things around. But is there any kind of apparition?”

I peeped up above the socks again. I could smell the lanolin in the wool, and the cleanness of the plastic packaging. The thought crossed my mind that Lockwood and George both needed socks, and that it would be Christmas soon; my next thought (less pleasantly) was that it was highly unlikely I’d survive the night to get to Christmas. I looked across the hall. It was now empty of all the dark shapes that had clustered there earlier. Either they’d been driven back, or absorbed into the mass of cold, pulsating energy that hung vibrating around us—energy our argument had summoned into being. I ducked my head down once more. “No.”

“No apparition? Oh, so it’s a…so it might just be a…”

“It’s a Poltergeist, Holly. Yes, it is.”

She swallowed. “Okay….”

I dropped Vernon’s leg and reached out to grip her arm. “But it’s not going to be like Cotton Street,” I whispered. “This time it’s going to be fine. You understand that? We’re going to get out of this, Holly. Come on. We can do it. We just need to get down two floors and across to the entrance. That’s not too far, is it? We do it quietly, and we do it carefully, and we don’t attract its attention.”

Over on the distant desk, the papers rippled, on-off, on-off, their hum soft and rhythmic like the purring of a giant cat.

“But Poltergeists…”

“Poltergeists are blind, Holly. They respond to emotion, noise, and stress. So listen to me. We make for the back stairs—they’re the closest. We go down to the ground floor and we find the others. We do it all step by step, stage by stage, very quietly and very calmly, and we never, ever panic. If we keep everything nice and neutral, it’s likely it won’t even notice us again.”

I gazed at her steadily in what I hoped was a calm, reassuring manner. On balance it was probably more a wild-eyed lunatic stare.

“Good luck with that….” Bobby Vernon said.

He was only half-conscious, but he knew. Poltergeists, you see…Here’s the thing: they’re bad. Hard to deal with, hard to pin down. Impossible to control. Where other Type Two Visitors always give you something to aim at, Poltergeists have no physical manifestation at all. No apparition, no substance, no shadow. This, for agents, is a major disadvantage. It doesn’t matter how faint a Phantasm, say, might be; once you’ve locked on to its shimmering translucent form, you can lay salt, strew iron, or lob flares to your heart’s content. A Raw-bones may make your bowels twist tight in abject terror, but at least you’re never in any doubt about where it is. That’s simply not the case with a Poltergeist. It’s everywhere and nowhere, and all around you, and more than any other ghost it feeds off every drop of emotion you give out. It feeds off it and uses it to move things. Just a small amount of rage or sadness can fuel its power.

Just a small amount…

Oh, God. What had we done?

What had I done, more to the point? I felt sick; I closed my eyes.

“Lucy?” Holly’s hand brushed my knee. She was giving me a wobbly grin. “It’ll be all right, you said? So…what do we do?”

I felt a flush of gratitude to her. My answering grin was probably equally wonky, and watery as hell. I jerked my head along the aisle toward the back staircase at the far end of the floor. “We get up—very slowly….We retreat a few yards at a time, along toward those doors. We just walk, we don’t hurry. We keep our heart rates down.”

“I can’t….It’s impossible.”

“Holly, we just have to do our best.”

Standing up was the hardest part. Standing up in plain view. Like I said, Poltergeists respond to sound and emotion, so technically it made no difference whether we were hiding behind a cabinet or wearing top hats and sequins and high-kicking like a pair of excited go-go dancers—provided we did it silently. But it didn’t feel that way. Just the thought of being suddenly exposed to the thing beside the counter made cramps race across my stomach on skittering spider legs. Still, we had no choice.

Whispering to Bobby Vernon to be silent, we both grabbed appropriate parts of him and, on a mouthed count of three, stood up. We stared over at the desk, at the purring pile of papers. Up and down went the pages…up and down in the cold, cold air….So far, so good. The rhythm hadn’t altered. Still, the dark crackled with psychic charge: it seemed that the tiniest movements we made would send shockwaves across the hall.

I nodded my head. Holly was nearest the staircase; that meant she would have to walk backward, arms looped under Vernon’s shoulders, with me gripping his legs, following behind. Vernon himself, eyes half open, seemed scarcely aware of what was going on. He worried me. I feared that he might suddenly call out and attract unwelcome attention.

Holly shuffled backward; I shuffled after. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the papers on the desk fluttering, fluttering….

Down along the aisle we went, between the hanging coats, pressing each foot down with tender, soundless care. Steadily we drew closer to the stairwell doors.

“Say,” a voice said in my ear, “this is exciting. I almost think you might make it.”

The skull! I rolled my eyes in dismay, biting the corner of my lip. Would his presence disturb the Poltergeist? I looked over at the desk, at the gently ruffling papers.

“Unless Holly trips and drops little Bobby and his head knocks on the floor with a whopping great thud,” the ghost continued amiably, “like a tufty coconut cracking on a rock. I honestly think this might happen. Look at the way her little hands are slipping….”

It was true. Holly had stopped, and altered her grip under Vernon’s armpits. Her face was as pale as I’d ever seen it. But we weren’t far from the doors.

“I call this a nice refreshing change,” the skull said. “You can’t talk back! Or reach around to turn my tap off. Means I can tell you what I think of you, without you giving me any lip.”

We shuffled on. I squinted frantically across the room.

It was okay. On the desk, nothing had changed.

“Don’t worry,” the skull said. “It’s not interested in me. We entities, by and large, keep ourselves to ourselves. It won’t pay any attention to what I do.”

I breathed out with relief. And just then Holly nudged a coat with her elbow, making its hanger scrape gently on the rail.

“That, on the other hand…”

My eyes flipped around; I looked at the pile of papers.

They were suddenly very still.

Holly and I exchanged glances. We waited. I counted to thirty in my head, forcing my breathing to remain calm. The room was dark and silent. Nothing happened. The papers didn’t move.

I expelled air very, very slowly. We tiptoed on.

“Hey, maybe you’re okay now!” the skull said. “Maybe it’s gone.”

An empty coat hanger on a rack on the other side of the room spun up and over in a whizzing 360-degree turn, then rocked back and forth with ever smaller movements until it was once again quite still.

“It hasn’t, you know. I was just kidding.”

We froze, watched the space. Again everything was still. I nodded to Holly. Grimly, grappling Vernon tighter, moving slightly faster, we inched along the aisle.

Away across the room, a ting of metal. One of the lights in the ceiling swung softly in the darkness. Holly started to slow, but I shook my head and we redoubled our pace toward the stairs.

We needed to hurry now. We needed to get out.

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s over there,” the skull said in my ear. “Or by the coats…”

I gritted my teeth. I knew what it was going to say.

“Truth is, it’s everywhere. It’s right on top of us. It coils around us like a snake. We’re all inside it. It has already swallowed us whole.”

All at once a squealing screech of feedback came from the speakers in the ceiling, followed by a low-level, crackling hum. Holly and I both jumped. Behind Holly’s head a pair of blue pajamas on a rail jerked too, as if someone was in them, legs bending, arms jabbing outward in a brief, appalling spasm.

Almost as fast as it had started, the energy went out of it. The pajamas hung limp, without animation.

A moment later we slammed through the swinging doors into the pitch darkness of the back stairs.

I dropped Vernon’s leg, flipped a penlight from my belt, and shoved it between my teeth. The light showed Holly, sagging against the wall, easing Vernon to the ground.

“Oh, God…” she said. “Oh, God…”

“We can’t stop here, Hol,” I hissed. “We’ve got to move. Pick him up! Come on!”

“But, Lucy—”

“Just do it!”

Onward, stumbling, down the stairs, contained within our bobbing sphere of light. We weren’t trying for quiet anymore, and we weren’t attempting to suppress the fear that, choking, rose within us. Holly was sobbing as she went; Bobby Vernon’s head bounced side to side as we careered against the walls.

We reached the turn. Behind us, the doors at the top burst open, smashing back against the wall. Their panels of glass shattered; fragments cascaded down the steps, rained past us into the dark. A squall of air buffeted against us as we collapsed onto the landing below.

“In there!” I’d been planning to keep going down, all the way to the ground floor, but I didn’t want to be stuck in the stairwell now. I nodded toward the door leading back into the store. Holly shouldered her way through—we entered the silence and darkness of Kitchenware at the far end of the first floor.

“Holly,” I whispered, “you’re tired. Swap with me. Let me go in front now.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“Side by side, then.” The aisle was wide enough for us to go abreast. It wasn’t too far. Through Kitchenware, then Ladies’ Fashions, then down the main stairs to the ground floor—that’s all we had to do.

Far off I heard voices calling us. Living voices—Lockwood, George…

“Don’t answer them,” I said. “Keep silent.”

We went as fast as we could. I kept expecting the door behind us to crash open, as if the ghost were chasing us. But Poltergeists don’t work that way.

When we were beside a stack of colanders, something slapped me in the face.

I cried out, dropping my flashlight, letting go of Vernon’s legs. He moaned, thrashed in Holly’s grip.

Another slap, stinging across my cheek. Cursing, I drew my sword, swung it around me in a wild sweep. Nothing.

In the next aisle, something smashed against saucepans.

Holly gave a yelp; a red mark bloomed like a flower on her cheekbone.

There’s only one good thing about Poltergeists: no ectoplasm, so you can’t get ghost-touch, even when you’re slapped around by them. It almost makes up for the higher than average chance of being brained by a sofa or skewered by a banister rail. We snatched Vernon up, staggered on.

Somewhere behind, a clattering; dozens of utensils cascading to the floor. And now came a horrendous din, a tumbling of tortured metal, peppered with grunts and snarls, as if a great beast was thrashing and writhing in their midst.

But the beast was ahead of us too. Farther along our aisle: a rack of knives of every size and shape. They quivered and trembled on their hooks.

Uh-oh.

I pulled us out of the aisle and down along a parallel one, just as the weapons burst free. Down behind a rack of chinaware we fell, rolling over in a heap as dozens of carving knives screamed through the air, embedding themselves in the floor around us, splintering plates, bouncing off copper pots.

Bobby Vernon opened an eye. “Ow! Careful. I’m in pain here, you realize.”

“You’ll be a darn sight worse off shortly,” I snarled, “if you don’t shut up. Come on, Holly! Get up! We’re doing so well.”

“What would doing badly look like?”

Feedback welled up through the sound system, vibrating jaggedly through the nerves of our teeth. We heard bangs and screams from elsewhere in the building. Somewhere ahead, at the entrance to Ladies’ Fashions, came an almighty tearing, a wrenching sound that told of something heavy and substantial being uprooted from the floor.

For a moment I hung back, unsure whether to go on.

“Skull,” I said. “I don’t know…”

“You have to, else you’ll die.”

“All right.” Practically using Vernon as a rope to pull Holly upright, I got us going again. We stumbled forward. In the next aisle, two display cases swung sideways and slammed into another.

“Mr. Aickmere’s going to be pleased,” the skull said.

“Yeah. He’ll be delighted.”

Holly was staring at me. “Who were you talking to just then?”

“No one! You!”

“I don’t believe you.”

Five Pyrex bowls flashed past my head and shattered against the wall. The wind whipped at my boots, threatening to snatch my legs out from under me. “Look, does it really matter right now?”

“If we’re going to be working together, Lucy….”

“Oh, hell! All right! I’ll tell you! It’s an evil haunted skull that lives in my backpack! Happy, now?”

“Well, yes. It explains a lot.” Several aprons, flapping like bats through the air, thrashed at Holly’s face. She batted them away. “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it? You only had to say it.”

We ducked through the archway into Ladies’ Fashions, just before an entire solid display case, whistling behind us, cracked against the arch and lodged there.

“What’s going on?” the skull growled. “You’re telling everyone about us now? I thought we had something special going.”

“We do! Shut up! We’ll discuss this later.”

“You know, Lucy”—Holly Munro gasped—“I used to think you were just plain weird. Now I see how thoroughly wrong I was.”

Ladies’ Fashions was quiet, at least compared to Kitchenware. Cold air cut against our ankles, keeping pace with us. At the far end I could see the elevator lobbies and the marble that enclosed the grand stairs and escalators down to the ground floor.

“Nothing sharp in here,” I said. “That’s one blessing.”

To the left of us—I could see it, but Holly, with her back to it, could not—the head of a mannequin turned slowly around, fixing us with its blind, bland smile.

And now the room erupted. An entire clothes rack reared up, slowly at first; then, with a kick like a bucking horse, it flung itself in a somersault through the air. Holly screamed; we launched ourselves back as it smashed into the pillar opposite and toppled down to block the aisle like a fallen tree.

Other racks were caught up, tossed high, sent smashing through windows and crumpling against walls. All around us coats were torn free of their pegs. They swirled up above us, hoods empty, sleeves billowing as if filled with invisible limbs. They hung in the air like witches on their sticks; the howling wind blew them around and around. Down they came now, thumping against our heads, whipping us with their trailing belts, slashing our skin with their zippers and buttons.

Bending low, pulling Bobby Vernon between us, we raced toward the escalators, dodging falling debris, dancing aside as floor tiles popped loose between our feet and went spinning off to crack in shards against pillars and walls. Clothing battered against us; a pair of pastel nylon trousers wrapped itself around my face, pressing close, clinging so tight, I felt my breath being stifled. I tore it away, looked over my shoulder at the whirling chaos at our back.

Far off, beyond the racing clothes and tumbling furniture, in a dark, still space, I saw a shadow crawling after me on hands and knees. It raised a stick-thin arm.

“Lucy…”

Then Holly and I had vaulted the marble wall and jumped down onto the smooth metal strip that sloped between the escalators. Vernon landed awkwardly; he shouted out in pain. Holly slipped, skidded on her backside down the slope. Vernon tumbled after her. I kept my footing, slid after them; and so, because I remained upright, saw what was happening in the grand foyer of Aickmere’s department store.

Light greeted us from below: oddly swirling light. It came from four agency lanterns, spinning in midair.

It had occurred to me more than once to wonder where the others were. Where, in particular, Lockwood and George might be. I’d heard their voices far away, but they hadn’t come for us—and I couldn’t fathom why.

Now I understood.

The Poltergeist, and its energies, had not been confined to the halls through which Holly and I had been running. Far from it. It had been active in the foyer, too. Display cases lay scattered, racks embedded in the plaster pillars of the room. The murals on the walls were ruined, embedded with shards of glass torn from the entrance doors. The great artificial tree, Autumn Ramble, of which Mr. Aickmere was so proud, was at that moment spinning upward from its mount at the bottom of the escalators, its thousand lovingly handcrafted tissue leaves being torn off by whirling centrifugal force. And in the center of the room, the very floorboards were being ripped asunder too, wrenched up and outward, nails snapping, before being whipped out to break against the ruined walls. Loose earth from below floated upward into space and joined the lanterns spiraling around and around.

In all that room a single area remained untouched—a roughly semicircular space just in front of the revolving doors. It was surrounded by a set of iron chains, of triple thickness, wound around each other for extra security. Within this boundary, the floor was thick with strewn defenses—salt and iron filings, lavender sprigs, other pieces of random chain, tossed down for desperate protection. The spectral hurricane that blew around us beat against the edges of this sanctuary, making the border quiver; inside, however, everything was still.

And here stood my companions, swords out, shouting, beckoning to us.

There at the back, jamming the revolving door open with a plank of wood: Kate Godwin and Flo Bones. In the center of the space, Quill Kipps, slicing through lavender cushions with his rapier so that the stuffing spilled out onto the floor. And at the front, right on the lip of the chains, gesticulating, calling, urging us on: Lockwood and George.

My heart swelled to see them. I skidded down the bottom of the slope, jumped over Holly and Bobby Vernon, who were sprawled on the ground, and helped them to their feet. It was all I could do to stand upright, the wind blew so hard. A bent clothes rack, twisted as easily as a paper clip, crashed onto the escalators from above, twitched once, then lay there like a dead thing.

“Lucy!” That was George. “Please, come on! The place is tearing itself apart!”

George always was a master at telling you things you already knew. We started forward. Vernon looked green; Holly’s face was bloodied, either from her fall or from the buffeting we’d had upstairs.

In front of us the hole in the floor was widening. The floor burst open. Earth spat against our faces; a piece of wood struck my arm.

Lockwood threw his rapier away; he stepped out of the circle. I saw him stagger as the wind caught him; his coat billowed up and outward. With an effort he kept his feet, leaped across the edge of the hole. Then he was beside us, grinning that old grin.

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.