Lockwood & Co: The Whispering Skull

4

George had left the rapier room now and gone into the main office. I followed him in, taking my tea with me, winding my way amongst the debris of our business: piles of old newspapers, bags of salt, neatly stacked chains and boxes of silver seals. Sunlight streamed through the window that looked out onto the little yard, igniting dust particles in the air. On Lockwood’s desk, between the mummified heart and the bottle of gobstoppers, sat our black leather casebook, containing records of every job we’d undertaken. Soon we’d have to write up the Wimbledon Wraiths in there.

George was standing by his desk, staring at it in a glum sort of way. My desk top gets messy fairly often, but this morning George’s was something else. It was a scene of devastation. Burned matches, lavender candles and pools of melted wax littered the surface. A chaos of tangled wires and naked elements spilled forth from a disembowelled electrical heater. In one corner, a blowtorch lay on its side.

At the other end of the desk something else sat hidden under a black satin cloth.

‘Heat didn’t work, I take it?’ I said.

‘No,’ George said. ‘Hopeless. Couldn’t get it hot enough. I’m going to try putting it in daylight today, see if that spurs him on a bit.’

I regarded the shrouded object. ‘You sure? It didn’t do anything before.’

‘Wasn’t so bright then. I’ll take it out into the garden when the noonday sun comes round.’

I tapped my fingers on the desk. Something that I’d been meaning to say for a while, something that had been on my mind, finally came out. ‘You know that sunlight hurts it,’ I said slowly. ‘You know it burns the plasm.’

George nodded. ‘Yep . . . Obviously. That’s the idea.’

‘Yeah, but that’s hardly going to get the thing to talk, is it?’ I said. ‘I mean, don’t you think it’ll be counterproductive? All your methods seem to involve inflicting pain.’

‘So what? It’s a Visitor. Anyway, do Visitors actually feel pain?’ George pulled the cloth away, revealing a glass jar, cylindrical and slightly larger than the average waste-basket. It was sealed at the top with a complex plastic stopper, from which a number of knobs and flanges protruded. George bent close to the jar and flipped a lever, revealing a small rectangular grille within the plastic. He spoke into the grille. ‘Hello in there! Lucy thinks you feel discomfort! I disagree! Care to tell us who’s right?’

He waited. The substance in the jar was dark and still. Something sat motionless in the centre of the murk.

‘It’s daytime,’ I said. ‘Of course it won’t answer.’

George flicked the lever back. ‘It’s not answering out of spite. It’s got a wicked nature. You said as much yourself, after it spoke to you.’

‘We don’t really know, to be honest.’ I stared at the shadow behind the glass. ‘We don’t know anything about it.’

‘Well, we know it told you we were all going to die.’

‘It said “Death is coming”, George. That’s not quite the same thing.’

‘It’s hardly a term of endearment.’ George heaved the tangle of electrical equipment off his desk and dumped it in a box beside his chair. ‘No, it’s hostile to us, Luce. Mustn’t go soft on it now.’

‘I’m not going soft. I just think torturing it isn’t necessarily the way forward. We may need to focus more on its connection with me.’

George gave a noncommittal grunt. ‘Mm. Yes. Your mysterious connection.’

We stood surveying the jar. In ordinary sunlight, like today’s, the glass looked thick and slightly bluish; under moonlight, or artificial illumination, it glinted with a silvery tinge, for this was silver-glass, a ghost-proof material manufactured by the Sunrise Corporation.

And sure enough, within the glass prison was a ghost.

The identity of this spirit was unknown. All that could be certain was that it belonged to the human skull now bolted to the base of the jar. The skull was yellowish-brown and battered, but otherwise unexceptional. It was adult size, but whether a man’s or a woman’s we could not tell. The ghost, being tethered to the skull, was trapped inside the ghost-jar. Most of the time it manifested as a murky greenish plasm that drifted disconsolately behind the glass. Occasionally, and usually at inconvenient moments, such as when you were going past with a hot drink or a full bladder, it congealed violently into a grotesque transparent face, with bulbous nose, goggling eyes and a rubbery mouth of excessive size. This shocking visage would then leer and gape at whoever was in the room. Allegedly George had once seen it blow kisses. Often it seemed to be trying to speak. And it was this apparent ability to communicate that was its central mystery, and why George kept it on his desk.

Visitors, as a rule, don’t talk – at least, not in a very meaningful way. Most of them – the Shades and Lurkers, the Cold Maidens, the Stalkers and other Type Ones – are practically silent, except for a limited repertoire of moans and sighs. Type Twos, more powerful and more dangerous, can sometimes deliver a few half-intelligible words that Listeners like me are able to pick up. These too are often repetitious – imprints on the air that seldom alter, and are often connected to the key emotion that binds the spirit to the earth: terror, anger, or desire for vengeance. What ghosts don’t do, as a rule, is talk properly, except for the legendary Type Threes.

Long ago, Marissa Fittes – one of the first two psychical investigators in Britain – claimed to have encountered certain spirits with which she held full conversations. She mentioned this in several books, and implied (she was never very forthcoming about the details) that they had told her certain secrets: about death, about the soul, about its passage to a place beyond. After her own demise, others had tried to achieve similar results; a few even claimed to have done so, but their accounts were never verified. It became a point of faith among most agents that Type Threes existed, but that they remained almost impossible to find. That’s certainly what I’d believed.

Then the spirit in the jar – that selfsame one with the horrid goggly face – had talked to me.

I had been alone in the basement at the time. I’d knocked over the ghost-jar, twisting one of the levers in its stopper, so that the hidden grille was exposed. And all at once I heard the ghost’s voice talking in my head – really talking, I mean, addressing me by name. It told me things too – vague, unpleasant things of the death’s coming variety – until I turned the lever and shut it up.

Which may have been a mistake, because it had never spoken again.

Lockwood and George, when I told them about my encounter, had reacted at first with vast excitement. They raced to the basement, took out the jar and swung the lever; the face in the jar said nothing. We tried a series of experiments, turning the lever differing degrees, trying at different times of day and night, sitting expectantly beside the jar, even hiding out of sight. Still the ghost was silent. Occasionally it materialized as before, and glared at us in a resentful, truculent manner, but it never spoke or seemed inclined to do so.

It was a disappointment to us all, for different reasons. Lockwood was acutely aware of the prestige our agency would have gained from the event, if it could be proved. George thought of the fascinating insights that might be gained from someone speaking from beyond the grave. To me it was more personal, a sudden revelation of the terrifying potential of my Talent. It frightened me and filled me with foreboding, and there was a part of me that was relieved when it didn’t happen again. But I was annoyed too. Just that one fleeting incident, and both Lockwood and George had looked at me with new respect. If it could be repeated, if it could be confirmed for all to see, I would in one fell swoop become the most celebrated operative in London. But the ghost remained stubbornly silent, and as the months passed, I almost began to doubt that anything significant had occurred at all.

Lockwood, in his practical fashion, had finally turned his attention to other things, though in every new case he made sure to double-check what voices, if any, I could hear. But George had persisted with his investigations into the skull, attempting ever more fanciful methods to get the ghost to respond. Failure hadn’t discouraged him. If anything, it had increased his passion.

I could see his eyes gleaming now behind his glasses as he studied the silent jar.

‘Clearly it’s aware of us,’ he mused. ‘In some way it’s definitely conscious of what’s going on around it. It knew your name. It knew mine too – you told me. It must be able to hear things through the glass.’

‘Or lip-read,’ I pointed out. ‘We do quite often have it uncovered.’

‘I suppose . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Who knows? So many questions! Why is it here? What does it want? Why talk to you? I’ve had it for years, and it never even tried to talk to me.’

‘Well, there wouldn’t have been much point, would there? You don’t have that Talent.’ I tapped the bottle-glass with a fingernail. ‘How long have you actually had this jar, George? You stole it, didn’t you? I forget how.’

George sat heavily in his chair, making the wood creak. ‘It was back when I was at the Fittes Agency, before I got kicked out for insubordination. I was working at Fittes House on the Strand. You ever been in there?’

‘Only for an interview. It didn’t last long.’

‘Well, it’s a vast place,’ George said. ‘You’ve got the famous public rooms, where people come for help – all those glass booths with receptionists taking down their details. Then there’s the conference halls, where they display all their famous relics, and the mahogany boardroom overlooking the Thames. But there’s a lot of secret stuff too, which most of the agents can’t access. The Black Library, for instance, where Marissa’s original collection of books is kept under lock and key. I always wanted to browse in there. But the bit that really interested me was underground. There are basements that go deep down, and some of them stretch back out under the Thames, they say. I used to see supervisors going down in special service lifts, and sometimes I’d see jars like this being wheeled into the lifts on trolleys. I often asked what all this was about. Safe storage, they said; there were vaults where they kept dangerous Visitors safe until they could be incinerated in furnaces on the lowest level.’

‘Furnaces?’ I said. ‘The Fittes furnaces are over in Clerkenwell, aren’t they? Everyone uses them. Why’d they need more down underground?’

‘I wondered that,’ George said. ‘I wondered about a lot of things. It used to annoy me that I got no answers. Anyway, in the end I asked so many questions that they fired me. My supervisor – a woman named Sweeny, face like an old sock soaked in vinegar – gave me an hour to clear my desk. And as I was standing there, gathering a few things up in a cardboard box, I saw a trolley with two or three jars being pushed towards the lift. The porter got called away. So what did I do? Only slipped over and nicked the nearest jar. I put it in my box, hid it under an old jumper, and carried it away right under Sweeny’s nose.’ He grinned in triumph at the memory. ‘And that’s why we’ve got our very own haunted skull. Who’d have thought it would turn out to be a genuine Type Three?’

‘If it actually is one,’ I said doubtfully. ‘It hasn’t done anything much for ages.’

‘Don’t worry. We’ll find a way to get it to speak again.’ George was polishing his glasses on his T-shirt. ‘We’ve got to. The stakes are so high, Luce. Fifty years since the Problem began, and we’ve hardly scratched the surface understanding ghosts. There are mysteries all around us, everywhere we look.’

I nodded absently. Riveting as George was, my mind had flitted elsewhere. I was staring at Lockwood’s empty desk. One of his jackets hung over the back of his old cracked chair.

‘Speaking of a mystery slightly closer to home,’ I said slowly, ‘don’t you ever wonder about Lockwood’s door upstairs? That one on the landing.’

George shrugged. ‘No.’

‘You must do.’

He blew out his cheeks. ‘Of course I wonder. But it’s his business. Not ours.’

‘I mean, what can be in there? He’s just so touchy about it. I asked him about it last week, and he nearly snapped my head off again.’

‘Which probably tells you that it’s best to forget all about it,’ George said. ‘This isn’t our house, and if Lockwood wants to keep something private, then that’s entirely up to him. I’d drop it, if I were you.’

‘I just think it’s a pity that he’s so secretive,’ I said simply. ‘It’s a shame.’

George gave a sceptical snort. ‘Oh, come on. You love all that mystery about him. Just like you love that pensive, far-off look he does sometimes, as if he’s brooding about important matters, or contemplating a tricky bowel movement. Don’t try to deny it. I know.’

I looked at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing.’

‘All I’m saying,’ I said, ‘is that it’s not right, the way he keeps everything to himself. I mean, we’re his friends, aren’t we? He should open up to us. It makes me think that—’

‘Think what, Lucy?’

I spun round. Lockwood was at the door. He’d showered and dressed, and his hair was wet. His dark eyes were on me. I couldn’t tell how long he’d been there.

I didn’t say anything, but I felt my face go pink. George busied himself with something on his desk.

Lockwood held my gaze a moment, then broke the connection. He held up a small rectangular object. ‘I came down to show you this,’ he said. ‘It’s an invitation.’

He skimmed the object across the room; it flipped past George’s outstretched hand, skidded along his desk and came to a halt in front of me. It was a piece of card – stiff, silvery-grey and glittery. Its top was emblazoned with an image of a rearing unicorn holding a lantern in its fore-hoof. Beneath this logo, it read:

The Fittes Agency

Ms Penelope Fittes

and the board of the Estimable Fittes Agency invite

Anthony Lockwood, Lucy Carlyle and George Cubbins

to help celebrate the 50th Anniversary

of the company’s founding at

Fittes House,

The Strand,

on Saturday 19 June at 8 p.m.

Black Tie Carriages at 1 a.m. RSVP

I stared at it blankly, my embarrassment forgotten. ‘Penelope Fittes? Inviting us to a party?’

‘And not just any party,’ Lockwood said. ‘The party. The party of the year. Anybody who’s anybody will be there.’

‘Er, so why have we been asked, then?’ George gazed over my shoulder at the card.

Lockwood spoke in a slightly huffy voice. ‘Because we’re a very prominent agency. Also because Penelope Fittes is personally friendly to us. You remember. We discovered the body of her childhood friend at Combe Carey Hall. At the bottom of the Screaming Staircase. What was his name? Sam something. She’s grateful. She wrote telling us so. And maybe she’s kept an eye on our more recent successes too.’

I raised my eyebrows at this. Penelope Fittes, Chairman of the Fittes Agency and granddaughter of the great psychical pioneer Marissa Fittes, was one of the most powerful people in the country. She had government ministers queuing at her door. Her opinions on the Problem were published in all the newspapers and discussed in all the living rooms of the land. She seldom left her apartments above Fittes House, and was said to control her business with an iron fist. I rather doubted she was overly interested in Lockwood & Co., fascinating though we were.

All the same, here was the invitation.

‘Nineteenth of June,’ I mused. ‘That’s this Saturday.’

‘So . . . are we going?’ George asked.

‘Of course we are!’ Lockwood said. ‘This is the perfect opportunity to make some connections. All the big names will be there, all the agency heads, the big cheeses of DEPRAC, the industrialists who run the salt and iron companies, maybe even the Chairman of the Sunrise Corporation. We’ll never get another chance to meet them.’

‘Lovely,’ George said. ‘An evening spent in a crowded, sweaty room with dozens of old, fat, boring businesspeople . . . What could be better? Give me a choice between that and fighting a Pale Stench, I’d go for the flatulent ghost any time.’

‘You lack vision, George,’ Lockwood said disapprovingly, ‘and you also spend far too much time with that thing.’ He reached out and, just as I had done, tapped his nail on the thick glass of the ghost-jar. It made a faint, discordant sound. The substance in the jar stirred briefly, then hung still. ‘It isn’t healthy, and you’re not getting anywhere with it.’

George frowned. ‘I don’t agree. There’s nothing more important than this. With the correct research, this could be a breakthrough! Just think – if we could get the dead to speak to us on demand—’

The buzzer on the wall rang, signalling that someone had rung the bell upstairs.

Lockwood made a face. ‘Who can that be? No one’s made an appointment.’

‘Perhaps it’s the grocer’s boy?’ George suggested. ‘Our weekly fruit and veg?’

I shook my head. ‘No. He delivers tomorrow. It’ll be new clients.’

Lockwood picked up the invitation and tucked it safely in his pocket. ‘What are we waiting for? Let’s go and see.’