“Okay…” He nodded slowly. “I see.”
I waited. Out in the murk, pale fingers reached for us. Clenching, they jerked away. “Well, aren’t you going to say anything?” I said.
He was looking at his icy gloves. “What is there to say? Maybe you’re right. This way we don’t see each other very often, and perhaps you extend my life. Although, let’s face it”—he glanced out at the circling spirits—“I’m not likely to last long in any case, at the rate I’m going.”
I touched his glove. “We’ll get out of this,” I said.
“Of course we will! But I don’t just mean tonight. Kipps was right about me, and Rotwell was, too, for that matter. I don’t hold back, do I? When I set out to do something, I never take the safest route. Sooner or later, I suppose my luck will run out.” He shrugged. “I’ve always been that way.”
I thought of the abandoned bedroom at Portland Row. “Why is that, do you think?”
He hesitated. His eyes met mine, then they slid away. “Don’t look behind you!” he said. “I can see Solomon Guppy’s spirit again. The other phantoms seem to want to avoid him, which shows even the dead have taste….Okay, he’s gone. Listen, thank you for telling me why you left. I should point out that, despite your excellent intentions, you’ve still ended up standing beside me surrounded by a tide of ghosts….”
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t quite know how that happened.”
“I’m not complaining. Far from it. I’m glad you’re here with me. I think you keep me safe, if anything.”
Right then, the cape wasn’t the only thing that kept me warm. I smiled at him.
“And I’d like to say something else,” Lockwood said. “Back at Guppy’s house, you mentioned something about it being Penelope Fittes’s idea that I call on you. Don’t deny it. You did. Well, she may think it was her idea, but I’d been looking for an excuse to get you back all winter. I just knew that, unless I had a really good reason, you’d tell me to get lost. And you would have, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.” When I nodded, ice cracked on the back of my hood. “I would have.”
“Fittes gave me the perfect opportunity,” Lockwood continued. “But we’ve moved on from all that. Anyway, I’d just like to add”—he cleared his throat—“that if you ever did want to come back to Lockwood and Company—I mean as a proper, permanent colleague, not just as a client, associate, or hanger-on, or whatever it is you are right now—we’d at least have the pleasure of each other’s company for a bit before my untimely end….” He looked at me.
I said nothing. Around us, ghosts screamed and unholy shapes contorted. We gazed at each other.
“Wouldn’t we?”
“I suppose.”
“Think about it.”
“I have….All right.”
“All right what?”
“I’m coming back. If you’ll have me, I mean. If the others will have me, too.”
“Oh, I’m sure they can be persuaded. Though George will have to find somewhere else to store his underwear. Great.” His eyes sparkled. He grinned at me. “We should stand together in a haunted circle more often. Get a few things ironed out….” His head jerked up. “Hold on….”
I’d felt it, too, through the fabric of my gloves. A vibration in the links. The chain jumped again.
We looked at one another. “The Shadow. It’s coming back in,” Lockwood said.
I peered along the chain, through the rushing ghosts. “I don’t see it.”
Lockwood cursed. “I’m not meeting it in here. Heaven knows what would happen. No choice, Luce. We’re going to have to make a dash for it. Let’s nip out the other side, run for those doors. If we’re fast enough, the men there will be caught off guard, and we’ll go straight out into the fields. Happy?”
And you know what? Given the circumstances, I sort of was. “Go, then,” I said. The chain bounced up and down; over my shoulder I saw a bulky shape swimming into view. It loomed beyond the ghosts. “Go!”
We ran along the chain as fast as we could, and again the capes had their effect—the Visitors parted for us, and we stepped over the circle and back out into the hangar.
“Run!” As Lockwood said it, he was gone, his spirit-cape flying out behind him. It looked as if he were about to take flight. He had his rapier in his hand. I let go of the icy chain—the other post was just ahead—and followed him down that long building, head down, arms pumping, and out through the open doors. No one tried to stop us; we plowed on, over gravel, through the gap left by the missing panel in the fence, and onto the black grass. We kept running, running across the field, but heard no signs of pursuit behind us. At last we slowed down and came to a breathless halt.
For the first time, we looked around us. The field had changed. It was covered with crystals of ice. All around us mists had formed, and the icy ground lay shimmering under a black sky.
It was very silent. The wind that had blown across the fields earlier was gone, and the night was bitterly cold. Thick wires and horseshoes of frost lay in the dents and ripples of the hard black earth; the whole land was white with it. A flat brightness lay over the field and the escarpment beyond, and on the dark trees at its top. The source of this brightness was hard to make out. There were no stars in the black sky, and no moon showing. We stood alone in the field, looking back at where we’d been.
“Well, no one seems to be after us,” Lockwood said. His voice sounded small; it didn’t carry well in the freezing air. “That’s good.”
“Were there men at the doors?” I said. I found it hard to speak. “I didn’t see any.”
“No. They must have left. Lucky for us.”
“Yeah. Lucky.”
Looking back, I saw that the floodlights had been turned off. You could see the poles hanging above the roofs like giant insects, bent and dead. The buildings showed like pieces of pale gray paper, stuck onto a dark-gray board. Even the lights in the hangar we’d just run from had been switched off. The institute was bathed in the same subdued, flat, gray glow that lit the field and trees.
“Power cut,” Lockwood said. “Maybe that’s what distracted them.”
The outside of Lockwood’s cape was thick with ice; I could feel the weight of mine hanging on me, too. The insulating qualities of the feathers still worked well, though—I sensed, rather than felt, the grueling cold all around. White threads swirled around us.
“Where’d all this mist come from?” I said. “All this frost? It wasn’t here before.”
“Some effect of their experiments?” Lockwood suggested. “I don’t know.”
“It’s a strange light. Everything’s so flat.”
“Moonlight does odd things,” Lockwood was looking toward the trees.
“Where is the moon?”
“Behind the clouds.”
But there were no clouds.
“We’d better get going,” Lockwood said. “The others should be halfway back to the village by now. They’ll be getting help. We should join them, reassure them we’re okay.”
“I don’t understand it.” I was still looking up at the sky.
“We need to catch up with them, Luce.”
Of course we did.
We started walking. Frost cracked underfoot, and our breath hung in the air so that we plunged through it with each step.
“It’s so cold,” I said.
“We were lucky they didn’t come after us,” Lockwood said again. He glanced over his shoulder. “Odd, though…I’d have thought somebody might come.”
But we were the only moving things in that wide, wide field.
By unspoken agreement we took the lane through the forest. The light was different there, too. The gray haze seemed to penetrate everything. The lane was white as bone. Thin lariats of mist wound in and out of the trees.
“This is weird,” I whispered. “There’s nobody anywhere.”
I’d thought we might see the others ahead of us, but the road was empty, and we could see a good distance in the soft, flat ligh
t. We hurried on, following the gradient downhill. We passed the side track to the open quarry, with its little memorial cairn of stones. The flowers that had decorated it were gone, and the photograph at its top was frosted with ice. There was no sound in the gray forest, and no wind. Shimmering crystal flecks fell from the surface of our capes, and our breaths came in brief and painful bursts. Soon we would reach the village. Our friends would be there.
“Maybe there are some people about,” Lockwood said softly. Neither of us had spoken for a while. When we did, neither of us wanted to raise our voices; I don’t know why. “I thought I saw someone walking down that side track from the quarry. You know, just beyond the cairn.”
“You want to go back, see who it was?”
“No. No, I think we should just keep going.”
We walked more quickly after that, our boots clicking on the frost-hard road. We crossed the silent forest and came to the wooden footbridge over the little stream.
The stream was gone. The bridge spanned a dark, dry channel of black earth that wound off among the trees. Lockwood shone his flashlight beam on it, the light frail and flickering.
“Lockwood,” I said, “where’s the water?”
He leaned against the railing, as if weary. He shook his head, said nothing.
I could hear my voice cracking with panic. “How can it have just…disappeared? I don’t understand. Have they dammed it suddenly?”
“No. Look at the ground. Bone-dry. There’s never been any water here.”
“But that makes no—”
He pushed himself upright, his hand rasping as it pulled free of the rail. Ice particles glistered on the fingers of his glove. “We’re almost at the village,” he said. “Perhaps there’ll be answers there. Come on.”
But when we came down from the lane, the village had changed, too. Never exactly well-lit, the cottages around the green were now entirely dark. Their shapes merged in the half-light and could scarcely be seen. The green itself was filled with shifting coils of mist. Above us, the church tower blended with the pewter-black sky.
“Why are all the lights off here, too?” I said.
“Not just off,” Lockwood whispered. He pointed. “Look by the church. The ghost-light’s gone.”
It was true. True, and it made no sense. On the little mound beside the church, there was an empty space. The rusty, disused ghost-lamp wasn’t just gone—there was no trace of it ever having been there at all.
I didn’t say anything. Nothing made any sense, not since we’d come out of the institute. A creeping, pervading wrongness hung over everything; in the cold, the silence, the soft, pale light, and the terrible, sapping solitude of it all. But it numbed you, too; it was hard to think.
“Where is everybody?” I murmured. “Someone should be around, surely.”
“It’s after dark—they’re all at home. And George and the others will be safe inside the inn.” Lockwood’s voice didn’t carry any conviction. “We know half the village is deserted, anyway. We shouldn’t expect to see anyone.”
“So we go to the inn?”
“We go to the inn.”
But the inn, when we reached it, was as dark as all the rest. Its sign was blistered with frost. The door swung open to the touch, and a faint stale smell came from the black interior. Neither of us wanted to go inside.
We walked back out onto the green and stood there, wondering what to do. When I looked down, I saw that where my boots protruded beyond frozen drapes of the spirit-cape, the leather and steel caps were white with ice. Our capes were almost solid; they creaked whenever we moved. Then I noticed something else. A thin gray plume of smoke was rising from Lockwood’s cape, drifting away into the dark air. The surface flickered, as if with heatless flames.
“Lockwood, your cape—”
“I know. Yours is doing it, too.”
“It’s like…like when we saw the Shadow. You remember how it left a trail of…”
“We need to think about this.” Lockwood’s face was drawn, but his eyes blazed defiantly. “What have we done that might have made things different? There’s only one thing. Up at the institute, what did we do?”
“We went into the circle.”
“Yes, and…”
“And we came out again.” I looked at him, suddenly aware. “We left the circle on the other side….We followed the iron chain and left on the other side.”
“You’re right. Maybe that’s important. I don’t know why it should be, but if it is…”
“All this…” I said.
“All this isn’t what it looks like.” Lockwood stared at me. “What if we haven’t actually come out, Lucy? What if we’re somehow still inside?”
How dark the green was, how thick the rising mists, how unyielding the silence.
“We have to get back to the circle,” Lockwood said.
“No, look,” I said, my voice rising in my relief. “We’re talking nonsense. There they are.”
I pointed across the green. On the far side, within the mist, three figures were limping slowly up the road toward us.
Lockwood frowned. “You think that’s them?”
“Who else would it be?”
He squinted out from under his steaming hood. “It’s not them….No, look—they’re adults. They’re all too tall. Plus, I thought those cottages were abandoned. Didn’t Skinner say—?”
“Well, anyway, maybe they can tell us what’s going on,” I said. “And look, here’s somebody else coming.”
It was a little girl, stepping out of a garden in front of a house. She opened the gate and shut it carefully behind her, before starting toward us. She had a pretty blue dress on.
“I don’t recognize her,” I said. “Do you?”
“No, Lucy…” Lockwood was turning on his heels, looking all around. The mists were pretty thick over by the duck pond, but we could just see someone walking along the opposite bank, between the barren willows—a lady with long pale hair. “Nor her…” Lockwood said, “Nor any of them. But we’ve heard about them all.”
There were other movements in the mist, people coming out of their houses, latches lifting, gates being softly unlocked.
“Lucy,” Lockwood said, “we really need to go.”
“But look, that little girl—”
“Danny Skinner told us about her, Luce. Remember? Hetty Flinders, with her nice blue frock.”
Hetty Flinders? Yes….
She’d died.
With steady, unhurried steps, the girl in the blue dress and the other inhabitants of the dark village made their way toward us. You could see the details of their clothes—some modern, others less so. Their faces were as gray as the frosted ground.
For a few dreadful seconds it was as if some power pinned us where we stood; our blood was water, our limbs cold stones. But we had the warmth of the spirit-capes around us; and, deep inside, our willpower still burned strong. As one, we shrugged the death-clasp off. As one, we began to run.
We pressed close together, hoods low over our faces against the cold. We cut across the green, boots thrumming on the hollow, frozen earth. Smoke poured from our icy capes, extending behind us like a comet’s tail.
The green was not a big space, but it seemed to expand as we went across it. It took a long time to get near the church. We passed beneath the tower at last. Looking up, I saw the shape of a person standing there; I felt him lock his gaze with mine.
We ran down the lane past the churchyard. From the other side of the hedged embankment came noises—the grinding of stone, the whisper of rustling cloth. Shapes appeared at the hedge. They began pushing their way through, framed against the sky.
Out of the village, up the cold road. It was hard to move fast; whether it was the chill, or something else, my limbs felt like lead. It was like walking through mud, like going the wrong way up an escalator. Lockwood, usually so fleet of foot, was having the same problem. Our breaths came in gasps. Over our shoulders, we could see the people of the gravey
ard and the people of the village congregating in the road, pooling toward us, following our trail.
We fled over the footbridge, over the dried-up stream, into the woods. We took the shortest way. At the turning to the quarry, a man stood waiting for us at the cairn. His face was the one we’d seen in the photograph atop the neat pile of stones; his features too were blurred as if by rain. He walked into the center of the lane and reached out for us. Lockwood and I veered away, off the road, up into the forest. The ground was thick with dead black brambles that burst into dust as we ran through them. The branches of the trees were sharp and snaring, snagging at our faces, catching on our clothes. We ran through light and dark, dodging, jumping, fighting against the cold, thick air.
I could see other people in the trees now, moving slowly, yet somehow effortlessly keeping pace. They were homing in on us from either side. Lockwood, just ahead of me, took a flare from his belt. He threw it at the nearest figure; it struck a tree root, bounced, broke open. The breaking made no noise; and nothing came out—no burst of light, no dazzling white fire. I’d instinctively squeezed my eyes tight shut; now I opened them, one after the other, to see our pursuers clambering over the roots, working their way implacably through brambles, still silent, patient, utterly unmoved.
We struggled up an icy slope, skidding, gasping; and all at once plunged down a steep hollow into a thicket. Black thorns stabbed my spirit-cape, intertwining with the silver, snaring it in several places. I was pulled back, trapped and twisting. As I struggled, the spirit-cape ripped. It tore in two. I screamed. A piercing cold like death stabbed me like a knife driven between the shoulders. I couldn’t breathe. I fell to the ground. Feathers scattered on the frost beside me like smoking drops of blood.
I couldn’t breathe….
Then Lockwood was beside me, pulling me to him, dragging me beside him under his cape. Its softness enfolded me. The desperate cold lingered for a moment. It drew back painfully, like clawed fingers being withdrawn. I took a wrenching breath. I could feel Lockwood’s warmth against me, and mine against him. We crouched together, side by side, his arm around me, my right knee pressed tight against his left. Our faces were very close, mine lower, his higher, leaning together as we peered out from under the burning hood at the swirling grayness all around.
The Screaming Staircase Page 30