The Empty Grave

by Jonathan Stroud

  “Well,” he said. “That’s a mess.”

  “Oh, Quill…”

  “Typical. And I was feeling so chipper.”

  I swallowed down my panic. I was alone with him, and I didn’t know what to say or do. “Listen,” I said, “maybe you’d better stay here.”

  He did look at me then. “What, on my own? See you all go through without me? Leave me standing here like an idiot in the dark? I don’t think so.”

  “But Quill, that wound—On the other side—”

  Kipps didn’t speak for a moment. “I know,” he said. “Maybe. But if it happens, it’s got to be done right, in the proper place. Anyway, I’m not staying here. Especially in this stupid outfit. Now—we need to go through.”

  Still I hesitated. “Quill,” I said, “you were brilliant just now.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Without you—”

  He grinned at me. “You and Tony and the others would never have made it, would you? Glad I made a contribution.”

  “Oh, God,” I said.

  “It’s okay. Take my hand, Lucy, and let’s go.”

  He was correct, of course. Whatever happened, it had to be done right. There was nothing else to say. Slowly, I took his hand. We walked together across the iron bridge. The ghosts did their usual. We ignored them. We passed through the psychic vortex, the breach between worlds. Bright neon light shone ahead of us, and I could feel life pouring back into my body. I think Quill felt it, too; his grip tightened on mine, flared suddenly warm and strong. It didn’t last. We crossed the iron wall and left the gate, back into our world. We were in the proper place. Before we had left the walkway, Kipps was already falling.

  Don’t ask me for a careful, reasoned account of what happened after that. I can’t give you one. My excuse is that when you step back out through a gate (I’ve done this since, and know it to be so), you’re always sick, confused, and ill. You don’t see straight; every sense is shrieking with the sudden onslaught of light and sound, with the feel of warm air on your skin and in your lungs; your body goes into a kind of temporary shutdown and muscular collapse. This is particularly marked when you’ve been on the Other Side for a long time, as we had, and it’s not a condition that makes it easy to follow what’s going on.

  Panic’s similar. Sudden, unexpected panic all the more so. So it’s hard to piece together the fragments I’ve retained: Lockwood dragging Kipps and me bodily clear of the circle; blood on the floor; Lockwood bent over Kipps; George holding his hand; everyone bent over him, with his cloak of feathers being stripped away; more blood—there was such a lot of it; white cloths being brought from somewhere; Holly holding them to his side in an effort to stanch the wound. All this while Lockwood kept talking to Kipps, joking, smiling, pouring out encouraging words. Kipps lay very still. He was white-faced; his hair shone with melting ice. There were faint rings around his eyes where the goggles had been.

  “Lucy, George,” Holly said, “I want fresh towels and bandages. There must be some in here.”

  I stood, shakily, and surveyed the room in which we found ourselves. It was a clean and orderly place. Okay, sure, it had a massive ghostly maelstrom at its heart, but all that whirring chaos was nicely contained within the iron circle. Once across the bridge, as we were now, you found a brightly lit and whitewashed room with all the sterile neatness of an operating theater. Racks of goggles and silver suits hung along the walls, each one named and numbered; there were trolleys and wheeled plastic bins with a few discarded suits; a pair of stilts, propped in a corner like the legs of an idling drunkard; even a few safety notices by the doors.

  It wasn’t so neat and tidy when George and I had finished with it. We stumbled around, wrenching open cupboards, pulling out drawers. George found a cabinet of medical supplies; he dragged it across the room. I went through an arch into a tiled washroom, where ranks of shower cubicles showed where the workers scrubbed up after a hard shift beyond the gate. There were plenty of towels here; I brought a load back and placed some under Kipps’s head, while Holly did the best she could with bandages and wadding. She was still wearing her cape of animal fur. The ice in it had melted; it looked forlorn and matted. A puddle of brownish water lay around her. I took towels and did my best to wipe it up.

  At last, Holly’s frantic efforts slowed and stopped. She knelt back, bloodied hands flopping in her lap. Kipps’s eyes were closed. He didn’t move.

  Lockwood had stopped speaking to him. His head dropped; he sat back in exhausted silence. George and I slumped to the floor. We stared at each other across the body, four pathetic visitations of feathers and fur and snot and melted ice. Our eyes were puffy and red, our faces purpled where the circulation was returning beneath the frozen skin. The grip of the Other Side was lessening with every second, but an icy numbness clung to my heart. I looked at Kipps lying there on the floor.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said at last. “I…I saw him get hurt. I should have known it was bad. But…but with so much going on…I never thought to look.”

  No one said anything.

  “He was so brave over there. He was so strong, so full of life….” I sniffed loudly. “Too strong. It was only at the very end that I realized he was dying.”

  Kipps opened an eye. “What do you mean, dying? I bloody well hope not.”

  “Quill!” I jerked back in shock. Lockwood and the others sat up, openmouthed.

  “Who says I’m dying? Did you see the amount of sheer effort it took me to escape the land of the dead? I’m not going back in now!”

  “Quill!” In my surprise and joy I leaned down and gave him an awkward hug.

  “Ow!” he cried. “Careful! I’ve got a hole right through me. And watch with those feathers. I’m sure I’m allergic to them.” We were all around him now, talking at once, our misery falling away like ice chunks off our thawing capes. “If Cubbins kisses me,” Kipps said, “I swear I will pass back over to the Other Side….What I really need right now is a drink of water.”

  That was quickly given to him. Kipps tried to sit up, but the pain was too much. A reddish stain was showing through the thick layers of bandages and dressing that Holly had applied.

  She shook her head. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital, Quill,” she said. “Being on the Other Side somehow stopped the blood loss, but now that we’re back out here, it’s started flowing freely again. It’s like you were just stabbed five minutes ago. There’s no time to lose.” She got up, cast her furry cloak aside, and stood there, arms folded. “Lockwood, what’s the plan?”

  Kipps gave a hollow groan. “Not another of his plans! Please, just kill me now.”

  Lockwood had also risen. He removed his silver cape, and now stood ready with his hand on his sword hilt. He was smiling down at Quill, and suddenly a great happiness rose in me, a fierce confidence that everything would be well. Yes, we were injured and weary, and deep underground in the forbidden basement of Fittes House, with any number of dangers between us and escape. But we had walked through the Other Side together, and emerged alive. During that terrible journey, my emotions had been suspended—there’d been no time or energy to think of them. Now, suddenly, everything was unleashed. I was full of love and gratitude to Lockwood and to all my friends—between us, we’d come through.

  “It’s pretty simple, Quill,” Lockwood said easily. “We’re going to find our way out of this place and get you to a doctor. Much as I want to find that silver elevator and go confront Marissa, we can’t until that’s done. You’re our priority now. We’ll take you up to the ground floor and out that way. And if anyone tries to stop us”—he tapped his rapier grimly—“we’ll remind them politely who we are. The main question is how we’re going to move you. You’re in bad shape.”

  “I can walk,” Kipps grunted. “Set me on my feet, I’ll be all right.”

  “You can’t even sit up. Besides, you’ll just bleed over everything. We need transport.”

  George scratched his nose. “We could pop him in one
of those wheelie bins.”

  “I’m not going in a bin.”

  “What about that trolley?” I said. “It’s got wheels, too. We can get him upstairs in that.”

  Lockwood grinned. “You might just have something there, Lucy.”

  We helped Kipps to his feet. He was too weak to stand alone, and the wound was bleeding profusely. Lockwood took off his own coat and with his rapier cut off a long, thin strip of fabric, which he fixed around Kipps’s waist, holding the dressings tightly in position. Then we laid him on the trolley. It wasn’t a bad fit, though his legs stuck out of the end.

  “This is so humiliating,” Kipps groaned. “It’s like you’re serving me up as a dessert course. Ooh! Ah! Careful going over those bumps!”

  We pushed him out through an arch in the far wall. The arch was identical to the one by which we’d entered on the Other Side. Beyond—instead of the desolate cavern we’d walked through—there was a large, well-lit laboratory. Like the room with the gate, it was pristine, filled with scrubbed lab tables, technicians’ chairs, centrifuges, scales, humming generators, and any amount of sinister experimental equipment I couldn’t put a name to. A great number of glass cylinders, the same as the ones we’d seen being carried on the Other Side, were arranged in plastic racks. Some were empty. In others, drifts of that bright and shining substance floated dreamily. The place had a chemical smell. Rows of striplights lit everything and made my eyes hurt. Actually, everything in my body was hurting me right then, but I didn’t care. Inwardly, my heart was singing. We had survived the Other Side. We would be all right.

  At the far end of the room were three elevators, one silver, the others bronze. Lockwood and Holly pushed Kipps’s trolley toward them, while I made a detour across the room. The ghost-jar was sitting in precisely the location I’d expected, in the equivalent position to where the skull’s spirit had stood on the Other Side. Inside the glass, I caught the face doing something improbable with its tongue and nostrils. When it saw me shambling over, it flinched and raised its eyebrows in simulated horror.

  “You look dreadful,” it said. “Like something the cat dragged in. Comes to something when I’m the better looking of the duo.”

  I picked up the jar. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Sorry for what? Your appearance? Your character? Wait, I bet it’s your smell. Twenty-four hours of terror, violence, chases, and being for all intents and purposes dead plays havoc with the armpits. Don’t let Lockwood step downwind of you tonight, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “No. I’m sorry for abandoning you,” I said. “I shouldn’t have left you at Portland Row.”

  The face raised an eyebrow, and I caught a flash of the dark-eyed youth in the expression, then the plasm subsided back into its normal grotesque position. “Yeah, well, I’ve got to admit it’s worked out all right. You couldn’t have brought me here yourselves. Ooh, I see Kipps died, then. Pity.”

  We had reached the others at the elevators. Lockwood and Holly were standing by the trolley, on which Kipps lolled irritably. George had stopped at a rack of large metallic objects and was inspecting them closely.

  “Kipps is actually still alive,” I said. “See, he’s moving.”

  “Are you sure? That could be gas escaping. Corpses do that, you know.”

  “Is the ghost talking about me again?” Kipps mumbled. “What’s it saying?”

  “Nothing important. What have you got there, George?”

  It was unquestionably the case that Quill had functioned better than the rest of us on the Other Side. Perhaps because of his wound, perhaps because he truly was much closer to death than any of the rest of us, he had coped unusually well. By contrast, George had been nearly finished off by the night journey; but now his energies were fast returning. Bruised and battered as he was, he shared my elation at our return to the mortal world. There was now a glint behind his cracked spectacles that I hadn’t seen for some time. He indicated the rack behind him.

  “I’ve found a row of guns,” he said cheerily. “They’ve got the Sunrise Corporation logo, and they seem remarkably similar to those electrical jobs you were telling me about, the ones the Orpheus bunch had. And look at these babies….” He patted some large egg-shaped metal objects. “These look like industrial-strength flares to me—the kind Fittes sometimes use for clearing big ghost clusters. I was wondering if we might nick a few samples of each, Lockwood, just in case we run into any problems.”

  Lockwood’s smile was wolflike. “You know, George, I think that’s a very good idea.”

  It was a shame not to take the silver elevator. Its door was inscribed with the Fittes emblem: a noble unicorn, rampant, holding a lantern in its hoof. There was a tortoiseshell button on the wall, and a floor dial overhead, showing numbers from –4 to 7. Right now the arrow pointed to 7, the penthouse floor. That was where we ought to be going. But Lockwood was right: getting Kipps to safety was the most important thing.

  We called up a bronze elevator. One arrived quietly and admitted us all in, though it was a squeeze. Lockwood pressed the button for the ground floor. We stood inside it, listening to the smooth hum. No one spoke. I adjusted my rapier. Even though it was the early hours, many Fittes agents would certainly be at work; we expected a confrontation before we were done.

  There was a melodic ting, the humming stopped; the door opened onto the ground floor. Lockwood & Co. stepped out of the elevator into the Hall of Fallen Heroes. We had all removed our capes now, and were more or less as nature intended—swords at our belts; hands hanging loose; calm, implacable expressions on our faces. I had the ghost-jar under one arm. Kipps lay quiet on the trolley. The remains of Lockwood’s coat had been laid over him as a blanket to keep him warm.

  In the hall, flames burned on plinths to commemorate the many young agents who had died in action down the years. Urns of flowers and ancient rapiers sat beneath each shrine. Oil paintings of somber, serious-looking girls and boys lined the walls—all of them legendary, all of them celebrated, all long since dead and gone. They’d been cut down in their youth fighting the Problem; the same Problem that had in all probability been caused by the woman upstairs.

  Our jackets swung, our boots tapped quietly on the marbled floor, the ghost in the jar grinned evilly as we strode in a line down the center of the room. The impressive effect was only slightly undermined by a squeaky wheel on Kipps’s trolley. Even so, everyone we met stepped aside to let us through. Clerical workers stared from above their sheaves of typing; Fittes operatives gaped as we passed by. One old adult supervisor called out sharply to us; we paid him no heed and continued on our way.

  At the end of the corridor was the Hall of Pillars—that grandest of all shrines, testament to the achievements of Marissa—where the nine famous ghosts hung imprisoned in their Relic Columns. At that hour it was dark—or almost so. The lights in the chandeliers had been turned down low, so that the ceiling frescos glinted in the shadows, bright but out of focus, like fragments of remembered dreams. In their pillars the ghosts moved soundlessly, spilling out twisting rainbows of other-light. The floor was stained with shifting blues and greens.

  The hall was deserted. Beyond it was the foyer, and our exit to the street. We began to walk across it, boots tapping, wheel squeaking. In the nearest column I saw the translucent shape of Long Hugh Hennratty, the highwayman, grinning at us behind his billowing rags. And nearby, an array of other horrors: the swirling Dark Specter that hung above the tiny Frank Street coffin; the Gory Girl of Cumberland Place; the Morden Poltergeist; the Phantasm of the mad inventor, Gödel, forever searching for his missing arm.

  We reached the center of the hall. As we did so, Lockwood slowed, then brought the trolley to a halt. He sniffed the air.

  “Hello, Sir Rupert,” he said.

  A slight, slim figure stepped out from behind the Gory Girl’s pillar, bringing with it a brash and overpowering whiff of aftershave. Sir Rupert Gale was bathed in the ghost’s deep blue other-light. He clicked his fingers
; a set of burly shadows pulled clear of the other pillars and stepped forward to block our way. Other men emerged from the darkness at the periphery of the room; they formed a ring around us. They wore the gray jackets of the Fittes Agency and were armed with cudgels and swords.

  George, Holly, and I stood silently next to Lockwood. On the trolley, Kipps was a limp form.

  “Well,” Sir Rupert said, “it’s Lockwood and his friends again! You do turn up in the most unexpected places.” His voice was as urbane as ever, and his clothes were dapper, too; tonight he wore a gray-green jacket with black lapels, dark trousers, and a vibrant yellow tie. But the smile he gave was a gap-toothed grimace. There were bruises on his face, and a red weal from Lockwood’s sword-cut on his forehead. When he moved his hand, I could see a strapping at his wrist where I’d struck him more than twenty-four hours previously. His eyes glittered with incivility.

  “It’s not unexpected to see you here, Sir Rupert,” Lockwood said, smiling. “In fact, I’ve been actively looking forward to it. We have some unfinished business to attend to.”

  Sir Rupert Gale nodded slowly. “I thought you’d robbed me of the pleasure, stepping through that circle. It’s good of you to give me a second crack at it.” He gestured at the ring of men. “You’ll see I’m not relying on stupid criminals this time.”

  There must have been at least twenty of them in the hall; they were all stocky and muscular, their shaven heads like small boulders on which rudimentary faces had been drawn. These were the thugs who’d killed Bunchurch, the ones who’d given George a beating. My teeth clenched; my hand stole close to my sword.

  “Looks like you’ve got odds on your side of about five to one,” Lockwood said. “Are you sure you don’t need a few more?”

  Sir Rupert laughed. “What a motley little company you are. Like a troupe of traveling players, tattered and battered and woebegone. Lockwood’s lost his famous coat, Holly Munro’s all covered in blood, and Cubbins here can barely stand. As for Carlyle cradling a hideous ghost in a jar, the least said about that the better. And who’s that you’ve got lurking under there? It’s not Quill Kipps? Oh, dear. Not dead already, I hope?”