“What do you idiots want now?”
He hadn’t heard a thing.
It was cold out on the front porch, and there was a thin rain falling in the London night. You could hear it pattering on the hedges and on the concrete drive, and dripping from a broken gutter. Otherwise the city was quiet; we were in the dead hours, and nothing living was abroad. Cold, rain, and silence: that was a combo that suited us all right then. We needed to calm down.
One of the dangers of spending too much time in a haunted house is that you begin to follow its patterns and its rules. Since the rules inside the building are invariably warped and twisted, you find yourself slowly losing contact with the principles that keep you safe. We’d fallen into this trap in the Guppy house, separating too easily, becoming prey to individual psychic attacks. Holly, George, and I had all been affected; our nerves were on edge, and we huddled in silence by the porch lantern, munching chocolate and staring out into the dark. Lockwood and Kipps had so far not been directly targeted, Kipps either because he had rarely strayed from his iron circle, or because he no longer had the sensitivity to pick up on subtle manifestations. As for Lockwood, perhaps he was less vulnerable, and the entity had sensed his strength—it was hard to say.
Certainly he seemed relaxed enough now. “There you go, Luce,” he said, catching my eye. “Aren’t you pleased you came out with us tonight? No one can say that Lockwood and Company doesn’t show you a good time.”
I took a swig from my thermos. The night air was doing its job. My head felt clearer now. “Best evening out I’ve had in ages,” I said. “Random body parts and mortal fear? That’s better than Indian food.”
He grinned. “You’re doing great. If it was just Holly, George, and me, we’d have had a couple of visuals, maybe, but nothing more. Thanks to you, we’ve got almost too much information.”
I couldn’t help but smile at him. Compliments from Lockwood were always nice to hear. “Too much and not enough,” I said. “I’ve heard Guppy in half the rooms of the house. I’ve heard him walking around, eating, whistling, even chopping in the kitchen. Holly and George and I have all seen secondary flashbacks—again in different rooms. Just about the only thing we haven’t seen is the apparition itself. And we’re no closer to finding the Source.”
Lockwood shook his head. “I think we are. The table, the bones, that pot on the stove—they’re all aspects of the apparition. Guppy isn’t in one portion of the house, he is the house. He’s not locked in one small area; he’s everywhere. George—you told us Guppy almost never left the property if he could help it. Clearly he was obsessed with the place. He may be long dead, but that still holds. I think he’s still here.”
“Couldn’t it be the spirit of the victim, though?” Kipps said. “Thanks to George we know how his remains ended up in every room. Feet in the lounge, toenails in the pantry—”
“Eyeballs in the pantry,” George said. “In a jar.”
“Yes, thank you,” Kipps growled. “I don’t need the details again. The point is, he could just as easily be responsible for all this, couldn’t he? And you reckoned you heard his scream….”
“We did,” I said, “but I still think it’s Guppy. All the sounds relate to his horrible activities. He’s re-creating it for his own pleasure, and to freak us out.”
“Is the whole house the Source, then?” Holly asked in a small voice. She’d been subdued since the incident in the dining room. “Is that possible? If so, maybe we should just burn the place down.” She gave a little gulping laugh. “I’m not really suggesting that, obviously.”
George adjusted his glasses. “I don’t know….We’ve set fire to houses before.”
“Deliberate arson is not likely to impress Fittes or Barnes,” Quill Kipps said. “Besides, there will be a more localized Source somewhere—the psychic heart of the haunting. The problem is, no one’s ever been able to find it. Right, I’m going to make a suggestion in my official capacity as observer for the Fittes Agency. In our company, when psychic danger has been experienced and you haven’t got a clue what to do, the general rule is to retreat. Retreat and recalibrate. Live to fight another day.”
“You mean give up?” Lockwood was incredulous; he patted Kipps fondly on the shoulder. “That’s not the Lockwood and Company way.”
Kipps shrugged. “Then it’ll keep sapping your spirits with little attacks until you’re too frazzled to notice you’ve been ghost-touched. Unless you can draw the ghost out and persuade it to reveal the Source, which is hardly likely, I don’t see how you’ll ever get anywhere.”
Lockwood snapped his fingers so suddenly that we all jumped. “That’s it! You’re a genius, Quill! We’ll draw it out! Guppy’s been having his way for far too long. Luce, you’ve experienced most of his tricks. I’d say the kitchen was where most of the phenomena have been concentrated, wouldn’t you?”
“No question about it,” I said.
“Then let’s assume that that’s the room he cares about the most.” Lockwood’s eyes glittered. “I wonder whether we can upset him. Everyone drink up. It’s time we fetched our crowbars.”
Short, light crowbars, the kind favored by burglars in the days when ordinary criminals dared to go out at night, are a standard piece of agency equipment. They’re used mostly for knocking through walls or prying up floorboards in search of bones and relics, but they’re more versatile than that. Over the years I’d used mine for breaking open waterlogged chests, levering a coffin out of a sandpit, and—since the bar was helpfully made of iron—skewering a Tom O’Shadows to a door. I’d never gone as far as destroying a kitchen with it, but there was a first time for everything.
It was silent in the house as we went in and filed back up the hall. It was even quieter than when we’d first arrived: there was no psychic pressure at all. Even the lack of pressure was ominous: it suggested that something had drawn back and was watching us. We had our crowbars over our shoulders—except for Kipps, who’d found a rusty mallet in the garage, which he thought was even better. We passed the dark marks on the wallpaper, the handprints on the glass pane. Lockwood closed the kitchen door behind us. There was the drab little space, with its wooden cabinets, its notched butcher block, its old stained sink with ugly taps. The moon had moved in front of the house, and the kitchen was darker than before. George’s silver bell was still on the counter. He moved it to the windowsill, out of harm’s way.
We double-checked the iron chains in the center of the room and relit some candles that had blown out. Holly turned the lantern down low. Then we gathered by the butcher block. Lockwood inserted his crowbar into a narrow space between a countertop and the cupboard below.
“Kipps and I will start,” he said. “The rest of you keep watch.”
He heaved up the crowbar.
Lockwood said this was no real crime, given what had been done here. Even so, my nerves jangled as the old wood splintered. Maybe it was rotten; certainly it came apart easily, with a single great crack that echoed around the room. I imagined that sound reverberating through the rest of the house.
Maybe we all imagined that, because for a moment, no one moved. Even Lockwood paused with the crowbar still embedded in the countertop.
Nothing but silence.
So he went to work again, ripping into the brittle particleboard, forcing it back on itself so that it burst in a shower of splinters. After a bit he moved back and let Kipps take over with the mallet. Drawers fractured; shelves snapped like broken bones. Already a great hole had opened to the left of the metal sink, and the kitchen that had remained untouched for thirty years was altered irrevocably.