Lockwood & Co. The Hollow Boy

You 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.”

What had George said about the history of the prison? How it ended up being more of a hospital than a jail. The final inhabitants were lepers and people with other terrible illnesses. No one went there, everyone despised it. In the end the Tudor kings had driven them out and razed the place to the ground.

Driven them out…

I looked at the ring of broken skeletons.

Only they hadn’t actually bothered, had they? They hadn’t driven them out at all. They’d just trapped them underground and sealed them in, and pulled the prison walls down on top of them. Left them in the dark to die.

Simpler. Tidier. Solved a couple of problems at once. They were criminals and they were infected. Who was going to care?

Was it any wonder that this little room was the source of so much energy and rage?

“I understand,” I said again.

The shapes flickered, their dark eye-notches fixed on me, unblinking. I projected my sympathy outward as best I could. Whether they would comprehend the emotion; whether—if they did—they would readily accept it, after so long lying buried and forgotten, was impossible to say. So many hundreds of years, with no one any the wiser as to their existence….

Well, I wouldn’t blame them either way. I looked down past the dying candle and caught sight of something on the floor. I squatted down, not without a stumble (if only the floor would stop spinning!), and glared at it. It took me a moment to realize what it was—and that the skeletons were not themselves the deepest mystery of the room.

The flagstones where I crouched, unlike the corridor I’d come up, did not have dust on them, though dust was piled up thickly in and around the bones on either side. On the surface of one stone, not far from my left boot, something was lying, a cylindrical fragment, both white and brown. At first I thought it was a piece of bone, but as I lowered my candle close, I realized the truth: it was a cigarette end.

A butt from a modern cigarette….

I stared at it, frowning, head throbbing, trying to make sense of it.

Around me, movement. When I looked up, the ring of pale white shapes had moved inward toward me. I held up an impatient hand.

“All right, all right,” I said. “Give me a minute. I’ve just got something here.”

I stood up. Now that I thought about it, I could see that the whole center of the room was remarkably clear—of bones, of dust, of debris of any kind. It was like it had all been swept out to the sides. Someone was very keen on housekeeping. You’d think Holly Munro had been at work.

The thought made me giggle, and the giggle instantly woke me up. I frowned at the incoming ring of shapes. “You need to give me some space here,” I said. “You’re putting me off. Stand back a little, please.”

I went into the middle of the room, and after a moment to steady myself—everything was swaying in front of my eyes—bent down to scowl at the flagstones. I saw scratch marks in the stone, and here and there what I thought were splashes of candle-wax. I put a finger out to touch one of them, and almost fell over.

“You are seriously annoying me now,” I said. The glowing shapes had drifted closer and were no longer hovering above the mess of bones. Now they formed a circle around the edges of the cleared area. I could feel the force of their attention, the anger directed at me. “I’m not supposed to talk to you,” I said. “And I certainly won’t do it if you don’t step back. Go on!” The shapes retreated. “That’s better. What have you been doing here,” I said, “with all this wax and stuff? What are these circular scrapes? And this black burn mark here, right in the center? Have you been naughty? Have you been setting fire to something?”

The shapes said nothing, but echoes of the atrocity that had occurred here rose up black behind them; I could feel it welling above us, seething and dreadful, like a sandstorm about to snuff out a desert town.

“I’ll get you all a decent burial,” I said. “Proper coffins, proper rites. None of that furnace stuff. Don’t worry—I’ll talk Lockwood into it. He’s a little cranky when it comes to your kind, but I can fix it. Don’t worry. Lockwood will sort you out….”

At least he would if he was actually alive and well.

Out of nowhere, the thought came suddenly that he wasn’t. More than a thought—a conviction. What was I doing? What was I doing, talking to ghosts when Lockwood had been pulled away into the storm? Pain lashed through me. My head pounded; I almost sank down to my knees.

Was he back there, under the rubble? Maybe he was! He would have come for me ages ago, otherwise. My fear lapped out against the edges of the room in great almighty swells. All at once I could hear the figures whispering together again.

“You’ll have to speak up,” I said sharply. “Like I told the old guy in the armchair, this is your big chance! People like me don’t come along that often. Speak up and speak clearly….”

It was then that I saw that my candle was burning low.

That was okay. I had another in my pouch….Only, actually, I didn’t. Somewhere, back at the fall of rubble, maybe, I’d dropped it. No—I remembered setting it carefully down on the floor. I rolled my eyes at my own stupidity.

It was okay. I’d have to go back and get it.

When I turned around, the shapes were blocking the way.

“Now,” I said, “you need to just let me—Ow!” Hot wax had burned my fingers. The candle was so low, the molten stuff was sloshing out. I set it on the floor between my feet and reached for the match box. Striking another match, I looked around for something else to light. Maybe the ghosts had candles. They’d clearly been using some recently.

“Do you want to move back, guys? I can’t see where you keep your—Hey!” One of the shapes had swept forward, more decisively than before. I got a glimpse of pale ribs within the shining body and outstretched arms; the eyes were flickering black flames—then I pulled a tin from my belt, ripped off the lid, and scattered salt in a blazing emerald arc to keep the form at bay. I’d done it so fast I hadn’t even thought about it; it was the old agency training kicking in.

“I’m sorry!” I said. “I’m on your side. You just need to keep back, that’s all.”

A ripple of disquiet ran through the shapes; their glow darkened, their outlines seemed to grow, become more angular and jagged. I cursed, threw my match down and, with shaking fingers, lit another. The candle at my feet was almost out. Light was dimming in the chamber. I held the match low, and over its bulb of radiance glared around at the encircling ghosts.

“What is it with you?” I snarled. “I want to help, and you always just end up trying to kill me….”

Another splash of salt, a ring of bright green fire; again the shapes drew back, whispering sadly to themselves. I could feel my panic rising; it was no good. I couldn’t control them. Individually they were weak, and I could bend them to my will; collectively, no: their anger was too strong.

What did I have? A bit of salt, hardly any iron—all used up in Aickmere’s. Just one magnesium flare. I scrabbled at my belt and, in doing so, dropped the match. By the last light of the candle, I reached for the match box, but my fingers shook too much; the matches spewed out of the box, spilled uselessly on the floor. I gave a cry, bent down to retrieve them—and saw the ghosts come sweeping in toward me.

That was the moment when the nub of candle chose to finally go out.