Lockwood & Co. The Hollow Boy

So 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.

Gradually, throughout the rest of the day, things fell into place. For most of us, at least.

Lockwood and Kipps went off together to speak to the newspapers; Holly and I went back to Portland Row. We did the usual cleaning-selves-up, showery-type things that you do after a job, and I went so far as to lend her one of George’s towels. We were sitting in the kitchen with the kettle on when George himself entered, whistling. I hadn’t had a chance to look at him properly that morning, but he seemed even more disheveled and weatherworn than earlier. He dropped into the seat opposite with a weary but jaunty air.

“What happened?” I said. “I don’t remember that black eye.”

He dumped his bag down on the floor. “Only just been given it, as it happens,” he said. “Flo and I found your room of skeletons, Luce—and boy, is it fascinating. I’ve been taking all sorts of measurements and notes down there. I’d still be doing it, in fact, but I hadn’t been at it more than an hour when a gang of Rotwell agents showed up along the tunnel and started cordoning everything off. They told me to get lost. Of course, I told them to get knotted. We shared some stirring words, during which I made a few telling points about their behavior, not to mention their clothes sense, facial asymmetry, and parentage.” He chuckled. “I was quite eloquent, actually, so much so that one of them tried to brain me with a femur he’d picked up off the pile of bones. So I lobbed a lumbar vertebra at him, and then Flo got going with the muck prong she keeps under her petticoats, and after that things got quite exciting for a while before we were finally escorted off the premises. But it doesn’t matter. I had time to draw a little diagram of the room before I went. I’ll show you later. Right now, I need a bath to cleanse my sweaty bits.” He peered over the top of his glasses. “Speaking of which, isn’t that my towel, Holly, you’re wearing ’round your hair…?”

It turned out later that the Rotwell operatives, working officially under DEPRAC command, had introduced a team of crack agents with the latest salt-guns, the ones connected to canisters of compressed spray strapped onto their backs. They spent three days cleansing the vaults of the King’s Prison and clearing out the mass of skeletons. I’d hoped the remains could be treated with respect and given a proper burial, but that wasn’t how DEPRAC worked. The bones were taken to the Clerkenwell furnaces and burned without further ceremony.

Careful observations were made in Aickmere Brothers for several weeks afterward, but no Visitors were seen there again.

As for the wider effects on the district of Chelsea, Lockwood’s claim that we had scotched the outbreak was put to the test the very next night. As darkness fell, agency teams tentatively entered the Containment Zone as usual, with Penelope Fittes, Steve Rotwell, and a group of top DEPRAC psychics observing from the watchtower on Sloane Square. A light drizzle hung in the air. The agents walked along the King’s Road and dispersed into the surrounding streets. Time passed while the dignitaries drank tea beneath their umbrellas and looked at copies of George’s maps, which Lockwood, who was present, had given them. In due course the agents returned and made their report. Ghostly activity had not ceased, but it seemed markedly less frenzied than on previous nights. Several Visitors that had previously been observed were no longer there; others seemed pale shadows of their former selves, slower and less formidable, and far easier to corral with iron and salt-bombs. In short, it was the first noticeable improvement in Chelsea for several months, and the agents were hopeful that it was the start of the turning of the tide.

Lockwood hung around long enough to receive congratulations from Ms. Fittes, give Mr. Rotwell a cordial bow, and wink at Inspector Barnes. Then he departed. Before he was out of earshot, he could hear Barnes once again becoming the focus of incessant questions.

One way and another, in fact, things were looking good for Lockwood & Co. And I would certainly have shared the general happy exhaustion—would have been more than satisfied with the endless phone calls, and the flurry of reporters now knocking on our doors—if I hadn’t still been haunted. Not by an actual ghost, but by the memory of one. Its face remained before me. Its words echoed in my ears. When I sat with the others, and still more when I lay on my own in the quiet of my room, I could not escape the vision of the other Lockwood. I could not rid myself of the hollow boy.