The Hollow Boy

by Jonathan Stroud

Flo rolled her eyes. “Classy. Lockwood does this sort of thing so much better than you. So what do you want? News from the underworld?” She chewed ruminatively. “It’s the usual round of backstabbings and unexplained disappearances. The Winkman family’s in business again, they say. With old Julius in jail, it’s been left to his wife, Adelaide, to get the black market side up and running. Though it’s young Leopold who everyone really fears. Worse than his old man, they say.”

  I was still scowling at Flo. I remembered Winkman Junior as a smaller, squatter version of his father, gazing at us when we gave evidence in the dock. “Come off it,” I said. “He’s only about twelve.”

  “Doesn’t stop you from gadding about like you own London, does it? Better keep your wits about you, Carlyle. The Winkmans are lying low, but it was you who put Julius away. They’ll want hideous, grisly revenge….So”—she tossed the tray aside and clapped her hands together briskly—“I make that one bag of licorice you owe me, Cubbins.”

  “No problem,” George said. “I’ve made a note. Only that’s not strictly what we’re after this time, Flo. It’s the Chelsea outbreak. You work the shores along there. A couple of blocks inland, all hell’s breaking loose. But what’s it like by the river? Are you seeing more activity?”

  Flo got up off the post where she was perched, stretched carelessly, lifted up the mud-crusted base of her coat, and set about scratching something in the recesses within. “Oh, yeah—there’s been a definite upsurge. ’Ticularly on the southwest side. The streets are thick with them there. I’ve stood at Chelsea Wharf, seen three Shades and a Gray Haze with one sweep of the eyes. ’Course, you never get ’em within fifty yards of Old Mother Thames. Just too much running water, ain’t it?”

  George nodded automatically, then with more enthusiasm. He was staring at his map. “Yes…yes, that’s true. Thanks, Flo, you’ve been enormously helpful already. Listen, can you keep an eye on the river edge for me? Particularly that southwest side. I’d like to know if it continues to have the most Visitors. Any patterns you see, let me know. There’ll be licorice by the ton in return, obviously.”

  “Okay.” Flo finished scratching, adjusted herself, and picked up her burlap sack. With one quick motion, she slung it over her shoulder. “Well, got to fly. Tide’s low tonight. There’s a rotted hulk off Wandle Keys that needs pilfering. I’ll see you.” In a few steps she’d vanished in the river mist. “Hey, Carlyle,” her voice drifted back. “Don’t worry about Locky. He must like you really. It’s been eighteen months, and you’re still alive.”

  I stared after her. “What does that even mean?”

  But Flo had gone. George and I were alone.

  “I wouldn’t pay any attention,” he said. “She just likes to annoy you.”

  “I guess.”

  “Likes to play with your emotions, like a cat batting at a helpless mouse.”

  “Oh, thanks. That makes me feel just dandy.” I looked across at him. “How come she doesn’t ever give you a hard time?”

  George scratched the tip of his nose. “Doesn’t she? I’ve never thought about it.”

  Lockwood returned from his Chelsea excursion early the following morning, having spent the hours of darkness walking its streets silently and alone. He seemed both energized and baffled by the experience, which had served to back up what we’d seen from the viewing platform and heard from Inspector Barnes.

  “The whole area’s awash with psychic activity,” he said. “Not just Visitors, though there are plenty of those. It’s the whole atmosphere of the place, like everything’s been disturbed. All the usual sensations we look for are there, drifting like invisible clouds along the streets. Chill, miasma, malaise, and creeping fear—you can feel them rolling at you down the alleys, or stealing out of the houses as you pass. They engulf you—it’s all you can do to draw your rapier. You stand in the road, heart pounding, wheeling around, waiting for the attack—and then they’re gone. I’m not surprised there have been so many casualties among the agents trying to make sense of this. It’s enough to drive anyone mad.”

  He had seen a number of spirits at a distance—in upstairs windows, in gardens, and the backyards of shops. The streets were mostly clear, peppered instead with jumpy groups of agents, who seemed randomly dispersed. Halfway down the King’s Road he had helped steer an Atkins and Armstrong team out of a Gibbering Mist; later, a conversation with a Tendy supervisor leading four shivering operatives across a little park had led him to Sydney Street, the supposed center of the disturbance. It had seemed neither better nor worse than anywhere else.

  “They’re digging up all the graveyards,” he said, “and sowing salt on the ground. Rotwell teams are bringing out equipment I’ve never seen before: guns firing salt-and-lavender sprays. It’s not doing a bit of good. Frankly, I don’t see us making a difference unless we come up with something new.”

  “That’s up to me,” George said. “And I’ve got a theory. But I’m going to need some time.”

  He was given it. From then on George undertook no new cases, but instead slipped seamlessly into research mode. Over the next few days we scarcely saw him. I glimpsed him once or twice slipping away from Portland Row at dawn, backpack bulging with papers, the documents he’d gotten from Kipps clamped under his arm. He haunted the Archives and the libraries of southwest London, returning only as night fell. He went back to speak to Flo Bones. In the evenings he sat alone in the kitchen, scribbling obscure notes on the margins of the Thinking Cloth. He said little about what he was doing, but he had that old spark back in his eye, glittering behind his glasses like a firefly buzzing in a jar. That showed me he was on to something.

  While he labored, the rest of us drew back from Chelsea. Lockwood visited it once or twice more, but achieved little, and soon returned to ordinary cases. This was what I was doing too. We didn’t, however, work on anything together. With her usual cool efficiency, Holly Munro divided things equally between us, juggling our clients and our time.

  Holly had been hired to give us respite and enable us to work more easily as a team. It was a strange thing, but we now seemed busier—and more isolated from each other—than ever before. Somehow Lockwood and I never went in the same direction, or even went out at the same moment. We got up at different hours. When we met at home, our smiling assistant was generally there too. Since the Bloody Footprints debacle, he and I had rarely been alone. And Lockwood seemed happy enough for it to continue that way.

  I didn’t think he was still angry. I’d somehow have preferred it if he had been. He just appeared to have removed himself from me, cloaked himself in the old detachment that had never really gone away. He was always scrupulously polite; he answered my questions, made bland inquiries into how I was getting on. Otherwise he ignored me. His head wound healed; only the faintest scar showed on his forehead, just below the hairline. Like everything else about him, he wore it well; but I knew it to be a sign of my incompetence and failure, and the sight of it pierced my heart.

  I couldn’t help feeling annoyance, too. Yes, I had brought him—and the others—into danger; I’d messed up, I couldn’t deny it. That didn’t excuse the way he’d locked himself away, as if behind iron barricades, and utterly shut me out.

  This was how it had always been with Lockwood, of course. Silence was his default response. He’d probably been like this ever since Jessica died.

  Her younger brother was unable to stop the attack…

  A case in point: his sister. He’d told us something about her, but hardly enough. I still didn’t understand what had actually happened in that room. Without his testimony it was impossible to know.

  Actually—not impossible. It could be done. I had Talents that could find things out. As I walked across that landing in my anger and frustration, I often glanced at that door.

  A week passed. George worked; Holly organized; the skull made regular rude comments. Lockwood and I kept going our separate ways. Now large posters were appearing near every Tube station advertising
the coming carnival: elegant Fittes ones, with silver hue and sober font, inviting us to “Reclaim the Night”; garishly bright ones for the Rotwell Agency, complete with a grinning cartoon lion trampling a ghost and holding a huge hot dog in its paw. Meanwhile, each day saw further demonstrations in the streets around Chelsea, clashes between protesters and police: people injured, water cannons used. The night of the grand festivity approached in a tense and nervous atmosphere.

  Lockwood had originally been reluctant to attend the carnival, as he was annoyed that we hadn’t been asked to contribute to the agency procession. To our surprise, however, we received a special invitation. Miss Wintergarden—now luxuriating in the freedom of her ghost-free town house—was one of the VIPs accompanying the procession on the lead float. She invited us to join her as her guests.

  The prospect of such a central position was one Lockwood could not resist. On the afternoon of the great day, the four of us made our way across London to the Fittes mausoleum, which was where the carnival would begin.

  Yes, that’s right. The four of us. Holly Munro came too.

  The mausoleum stood at the eastern end of the Strand, at the point where it became Fleet Street. It occupied an island in the center of the road. A church had stood there once, but it had been bombed in the war, and the stark, gray building that housed Marissa Fittes’s remains was its replacement. It was oval-shaped, with a concrete dome. On the western side two majestic pillars framed the entrance, which faced back in the direction of Fittes House. A triangular pediment atop the pillars was carved with the Fittes emblem: a noble unicorn. Monumental bronze doors led into the interior, which on special days was open so that the public could see the pioneer’s simple granite tomb.

  Darkness was falling now, but the carnival was a display of organized defiance, and there were many reassurances on show. Ghost-lamps hung suspended on cables above the roads. Lavender fires burned on corners. Lamplit smoke swirled above the crowds that washed between the buildings like a restless tide.

  Higher still, a giant inflatable rapier, silvered, shiny, and the length of a London bus, bobbed and buffeted against the soft, black night. The entrances to Waterloo Bridge and the Aldwych were choked with booths and sideshows. “Shoot the ghost” stalls rubbed up against “Poltergeist rides,” in which vast mechanized arms whirled shrieking men and women into the air. Merry-go-rounds featured cartoon phantoms, stalls sold cobweb cotton candy; sweets in the form of skulls, bones, and ectoplasm were everywhere on display. As with the midsummer fairs that normally featured such entertainment, it was the adults who were the most eager customers. Tonight they were protected; tonight the central streets were lined with lavender and salt, turning this artery of London into a fairyland of color that could be exploited safely. They hurried past us, men and women, old and younger, faces flushed with excitement at the transgression and the danger of it. An air of forced hilarity hung over them. I could feel their desperate need to turn their night fears into something childlike and unthreatening.

  We stood silently at a corner, hands on our sword hilts, watching the world skip by.

  “The grown-ups seem happy,” Lockwood said. “Don’t you feel old, sometimes?”

  “Yeah,” George said. “All the same…”

  Lockwood nodded. “Yes, I could do with some ice cream, too.”

  “I’ll get them,” I said. There was a stand opposite. “Holly? What do you want? A lentil and hummus wedge, or something?”

  Her hair was pulled back beneath a fur-lined hat, showing her face to good advantage. She had on that coat that was ever-so-slightly like Lockwood’s, and, to my annoyance, wore a rapier, too. “Actually, I think a soft-serve twist. It’s a special occasion.”

  “Oh, I thought you only did healthy.” I went to the stand and got in line for cones.

  Beyond the mausoleum I could see the carnival procession waiting—a row of ornate floats, constructed on the open tops of Sunrise Corporation trucks, and decorated with agency colors. On some, giant logos had been erected. The looped chains of Tendy & Sons wobbled on the end of a white mast; behind them I spotted the Grimble fox and the all-seeing owl of Dullop and Tweed. Each had been fashioned from papier-mché, steel, and wood, then gaudily painted. They were vast effigies twenty feet high. Around them stood willing young agents, ready to lob candy and pamphlets into the crowds. There were one or two show floats, too, housing troupes of actors who were to recreate famous scenes from agency history. Shivering corpses in white makeup prepared for battle with gallant agents dressed in historic costumes. They would perform throughout the parade.

  At the head of the line stood the largest vehicle, decked out in red and silver, the colors of the two great agencies. Above it, bobbing gently against the darkened sky, hung two vast helium balloons, firmly cabled—a unicorn and a rampant lion, the symbols of Fittes and Rotwell respectively. You could just see the chairs where Penelope Fittes and Steve Rotwell would sit.

  “Miss Carlyle? Lucy Carlyle?”

  “Yes?” The voice had barely carried above the noise of the crowd, and I didn’t recognize it. Nor did I at first make much of the very short and stocky person, swathed in a fur overcoat, with a broad-brimmed bowler hat concealing his bent head, who stepped suddenly toward my line. His trousers were of soft velvet; beneath them, expensive patent leather boots shone in the white lamplight. I caught a glimpse of an ivory cane held between heavily jeweled fingers; then, with a swift flick of his wrist, he tipped the hat back so that his face was revealed. It was a boy with a broad smooth countenance, a wide mouth and cheeks that subsided into his soft thick neck like folds of uncooked dough. Strands of oiled black hair were visible at the temples. Small eyes glared at me, sharp and blue as crystal shards.

  I knew him immediately. There was only one person with a face like that. Or rather, there were two, but the elder one was swarthier, hairier, and in prison. That other individual was the notorious Julius Winkman, the black marketeer. This youth was his son, Leopold, a chip off the old block.

  “What can I do for you, Master Winkman?” That’s what I should have said, in a cool, collected voice. As it was, I was too surprised; I made a goggling sound and just stared at him with my mouth open.

  George, suddenly at my side, spoke for me. “Can we help you?”

  “I have a message,” the boy said. “My father sends his compliments, and says he’ll be seeing you all very soon.”

  “Doubt it,” I said. “Your daddy got twenty years, didn’t he?”

  Leopold Winkman smiled. “Oh, we have ways and means, as you’ll soon see. And here’s something in the meantime, Miss Carlyle, by way of being on account.”

  With that, swift as a portly snake, he stuck out his hand and prodded me sharply in the solar plexus with the head of his cane. The air was driven out of me; I gasped and doubled over. Leopold Winkman flipped his hat rakishly low across his eyes, spun on his shiny heel, and began to saunter away. His picture of serene progress was interrupted by George, who, whipping his rapier from his belt, stuck it diagonally between Leopold’s legs so that he tripped, lost his balance, and tumbled forward into the crowd, bumping into three burly workmen and spilling their drinks on their wives and girlfriends. An altercation ensued, as Leopold unsuccessfully tried to escape, lashing out at all comers with his little cane. As his cries were swallowed by the angry throng, George helped me upright and led me back across the street.

  “I’m all right,” I said, rubbing my stomach. “Thanks, George. But you don’t have to bother about me.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “Rats—I never got the ice cream cones.”

  But it didn’t matter. When we got back, Lockwood was looking at his watch. “We’d better get to our seats,” he said. “Time’s flying. Wintergarden won’t want us late.”

  He led the way among the stalls and under the shadow of the Mausoleum where a row of armed officials studied a guest list and waved us in among the floats. Giant balloons moved above us; streamers gusted, engines revv
ed. We walked through gas fumes.

  Miss Wintergarden had said she was important, a friend of high society. As with other matters, she hadn’t lied. It turned out that she was on the first and biggest float, the VIP one. Up a gangway we went and out onto a wooden platform fixed to the top of the truck. It was very broad, extending out on both sides. Flags flew from poles above, and plastic lions and unicorns stood at intervals along the sides like sentries on castle battlements. Rows of chairs were already filled with the broad backsides of the great and good, men in dark, expensive overcoats, women heavily be-furred. Young members of the Fittes and Rotwell agencies moved along them, pouring out mulled wine and offering sweetmeats. From a far-off seat, Miss Wintergarden saw us, fluttered her fingers condescendingly, then paid us no further attention.

  Lockwood, George, and I hung back, uncertain where to sit, but Holly Munro seemed galvanized. She smoothed down her coat, adjusted her hat, and sashayed between the seats, nodding to people that she passed, exchanging little waves with others. She seemed miraculously at ease. At the front of the platform she looked back and beckoned. By the time we reached her, she was already talking to several of the most important people on the float, among them the leaders of the two great agencies, Penelope Fittes and Steve Rotwell.

  We knew Ms. Fittes already, and were on good, if distant, terms. A striking woman of indeterminate age, the twin auras of beauty and of power were intertwined about her and could not be easily separated. She wore a long white coat that dropped almost to her ankles; the collar and cuffs were made of brilliant white fur. Her long dark hair had been lifted and ornately styled; it was fixed in position by a curling silver band. She greeted us warmly, which is more than could be said of the man beside her—Steve Rotwell, chairman of the Rotwell agency.

  It was the first time I’d seen him in the flesh. He was a big man, solid beneath his heavy coat, and handsome in a ponderous sort of way. He was thick-jawed and clean-shaven, with unusual green eyes. His dark hair was turning gray behind his ears. He nodded at us distantly, his gaze wandering elsewhere.