“Look at all this…” Kipps said.
George whistled. “It’s like my bedroom.”
Lockwood peered at a bulbous glass beaker in which a violet plasm boiled and bubbled above a flame. “Can you tell what they’re doing here?”
“Ectoplasmic research, mainly,” George said. “They’re testing how it responds to stuff. To heat, to cold…This one’s suspended in a vacuum, look. That’s interesting: see how diffuse the plasm’s become….And they’re trying to galvanize this spirit with a succession of electric shocks.” He shook his head. “I could tell them that technique doesn’t work. Tried that on our skull a year or more back. Didn’t alter its plasm at all. Just made it grumpy.”
I’d been listening out for the skull when I entered the room, but without success. Now I was staring at a rushing centrifuge, which whirled its imprisoned ghost on an endless loop. “It’s not right,” I said. “It’s not…healthy.”
George looked at me. “I’ve been doing this sort of stuff for years.”
“I rest my case.”
“It’s all part of trying to understand the Problem, Luce,” Lockwood said. “Finding out what makes ghosts tick. It’s a bit extreme, but there’s nothing exactly wrong here.”
I didn’t answer. Lockwood had no love for ghosts; neither he nor George ever spared much sympathy for them. Me? It wasn’t quite that simple. I gazed at the busy work tables, with their pads and pens, their thermometers and stacked tubes. For some odd reason I remembered the vision I’d had of Emma Marchment’s seventeenth-century workroom, filled with the pots and potions she’d used to help her in her witchcraft. This was more high-tech, but otherwise it didn’t seem all that different.
“They’re certainly hard at work in here,” Lockwood said. “Everything mid-experiment. Which raises the question: Where are they?”
Kipps grunted. “Must be something better going on next door.”
This was obviously true, and the laboratory, with all its cruel marvels, did not detain us long. We moved toward the partition at the far side of the shed. As we did so, George gave a cry. He swooped to the nearest table. “Yes! Yes! That’s what I wanted to find!”
Holly stared at the container beside him. “A moldy pelvis?”
“No, you twit—these cigarette butts!” He picked up a jar that someone had been using as an ashtray, and gave it a quick sniff. “Yes, unmistakable—burned toast, a caramel tang! These are Persian Lights! The cigs we found at Aickmere’s. No doubt now. We’re dealing with our friends from Chelsea, for sure.”
“You think that’s good,” Kipps said in a low voice, “you might want to take a look in here.”
I could now see that the partition wall split the building neatly down the middle; the open arch led into a chamber that was almost the mirror image of the first, except with a tubelike passageway leading to another part of the complex.
The room had three long tables in its center. These, in contrast to the madly swirling glows of the tortured ghosts behind us, gleamed dully with more consistent light. They were stacked with boxes and neat piles of objects, laid out in ordered rows. There were canisters and cylinders and firearms. And other things, stranger still.
“Weapons room,” Lockwood breathed. “Check out these flares! Ever seen any that big, Kipps?”
Kipps had pushed up his goggles and was gazing around the room in awe. “We used some pretty hefty ones in the East End once. These are bigger, though.”
George whistled. “I’ll say. They’d do some damage if you chucked them. They’re as big as coconuts! Take the roof off a place, they would.”
We walked along the aisles, opening boxes, peering into sacks. Professional fascination had overtaken us. This was ghost-hunting equipment designed for agents, but equipment we had never seen.
“Got guns here that fire capsules of iron and salt,” Lockwood said. “They would have come in handy in Ealing….But what’s this?”
He stood before a metal rack, on which was sat a large weapon. It had a black stock, a long barrel, and, just in front of the trigger, a silver-glass orb strapped to the magazine with iron bands. You could see tiny bones lying in the orb. It glowed faintly.
“It’s basically a traditional shotgun,” Lockwood said, “but it’s been adapted. I may be wrong, but I think that if you fire it, a ghost flies out….” He shook his head. “It’s weird. I’m not sure DEPRAC would approve of it.”
“They wouldn’t,” I said in a small voice. I was staring at a tray of neat little wooden cylinders—batons, really—each with a glass bulb on the end. “They wouldn’t approve of any of this.” I picked up one of the batons and held it up to them. Supernatural light swirled in the bulb at the end. “Recognize these, anybody?”
No one spoke. They stared at the baton, openmouthed.
I took that as a yes.
The previous autumn, at a carnival in central London, two armed men had attacked a float on which Penelope Fittes and Steve Rotwell were riding. Guns had been used in an attempt on Ms. Fittes’s life, but the attack had begun with a bombardment by ghost-bombs just like these. When broken, Specters had emerged from them, threatening many lives. Where the ghost-bombs had come from was unknown.
Until now.
“Well…that’s interesting,” Lockwood said.
“But—but surely,” Holly said, “Mr. Rotwell can’t be responsible. The assassins tried to kill him, too….”
“Did they?” I said. “I don’t remember them turning their guns on him. It was Penelope Fittes they actually shot at—”
“No! What are you saying? He fought against them! He killed one of the attackers!”
“Yes, that was good of him,” Lockwood said quietly. “He came out of it quite the hero, didn’t he? Even though we saved Ms. Fittes’s life, and his primary purpose failed. It was always going to be a win-win for him.”
“I knew the Rotwell organization hated Fittes,” Kipps said, “but I never thought they’d go that far.”
“I can’t believe it,” Holly said. She had tears in her eyes. “No, I can’t. I worked for him.”
Kipps frowned. “We’ve seen enough. We ought to get out of here. Go and find a phone, call DEPRAC, get Barnes over now.”
“Not yet,” Lockwood said.
“Are you insane? This is critical evidence, Lockwood.”
“What would DEPRAC do? They wouldn’t just barge into a Rotwell site, would they? Even if they believed us, which is a stretch, they’d delay things by getting search warrants, talking with lawyers—by the time anyone actually set foot in here, all this would be gone.”
Kipps slapped the work table in frustration. “So what do you suggest? Keep strolling around in here until Rotwell finds us and stuffs one of these ghost-bombs up our nose?”
“The only place I want to stroll,” Lockwood said, “is that central building. We’ve got to see the main event. That’s where it is—through there.” Eyes shining, he jerked his thumb toward the opening in the sidewall. You could see the ribbed interior of one of the makeshift canvas passageways stretching away, lit by dim lighting.