“What?”
“You can open your eyes.”
“Is it all right?”
“Er, I wouldn’t quite say that. But we’re okay now. We’re okay. Just don’t let go of the chain.”
I opened my eyes. The first thing I saw was Lockwood. He was standing very close, facing me, the top of his hood almost meeting mine. He, like me, was gripping the iron links for dear life. Ice was forming on the outside of our gloves; the whole chain was crusted with it. Icicles hung beside us in the frigid air.
Ice was spreading over the outside of Lockwood’s cape, too; crystals grew between the shining feathers, and I could hear it doing the same on mine. But the funny thing was, the underside of the cape was downy warm. It cocooned my body in a bulb of warmth and stillness, and kept the chaos all around at bay.
Chaos…
We stood together in the center of a vortex of whirling plasm. Shadows swirled past us, swimming close, darting back again. Clutching fingers reached out toward Lockwood, shriveled to powder, and were carried back into the maelstrom. At our feet were scattered many Sources, and only the power of the capes—and the iron chain—thrust the ravenous spirits away. The capes’ effect extended to the sounds inside the circle, too. Close beside us, ghostly faces howled and gibbered, yet I scarcely heard them. If I had, I think I would have been driven mad.
“Well, this is jolly,” Lockwood said. “I’ve got to hand it to those witch doctors—they knew what they were doing. That’s how they went into those spirit huts and survived. These capes are only made of feathers and silver thread, but they’re just as effective as the Creeping Shadow’s suit of armor. More so—because they’re so much lighter. Together with the chain, they’ll keep us safe for as long as we hide in here.”
A vast shape drifted out of the murk behind him; it was a silhouette only, buried behind other rushing forms, but I recognized it at once. It extended a colossal hand toward us, was caught up by the remorseless flow of energy, and swept sideways and away.
Lockwood caught my look of terror. “Seen old Guppy?” he said. “Yes, he’s here. There are some other pretty horrific things, too. I wouldn’t look at any of them, Luce, if you want to sleep tonight. Stay focused on me and the chain.”
Just below shoulder height, the chain ran on past Lockwood and was lost in the mist beyond.
“Where’s the other post?” I said. “Where’s it tethered?”
“Looks like it goes straight through and out the other side of the circle. That’s fine. We’ll give Rotwell enough time to finish whatever he’s doing, and then creep out again, one side or the other.”
My attention was caught by a familiar face, red-eyed, jawless, spun about with smoke-like hair; it thrust forward from the vortex, glared at me, and retreated. So the skull had been right: the witch, Emma Marchment, was here, too.
“Lockwood,” I said, “where do you think we are?”
His face was close to mine. He’d been staring out beyond me, narrowing his eyes as he always did when using his Talent. “Oh, we’re still in the circle. Look, you can see the double doors over there, through the mist, and there’s the outline of the crates where we first came in. And there’s the pile of jars and boxes where you left the skull. It’s some optical illusion that makes everything so faint and gray….” His voice trailed off.
“An optical illusion?”
“Of course. That’s all it is. Caused by all these Sources piled around us.”
“I guess….” It was true that you could sense the structure of the building, hovering beyond the swirling mist. The doors, the crates, the metal post, the platform at the end, were all just barely discernable in a faint and curiously flat way.
And yet…
It was the chain that really got me. The iron chain.
You know when you look at a drinking straw in a glass of lemonade? How it seems to bend at the point where it enters the liquid? That’s refraction, according to George, and the weird thing was, the metal chain was doing precisely that. There was its line, right next to us, the links covered in ice. You could follow it, stretching out toward the metal post, to where the guy in the suit had collapsed. It was a straight line—I knew that because I’d walked along it—but it didn’t look that way. At the point where it crossed over the ring of objects, it seemed to veer sideways, and also grow an awful lot fainter.
Why did it do that? It bothered me.
And where were the Rotwell people? We’d just heard them coming in. That’s why we were standing there, by an icy chain, surrounded by a host of angry spirits, in the middle of that stupid building.
Try as I might, I couldn’t see—or hear—them at all.
At least that meant they were unlikely to spot us, either.
“The armored man,” I said. “You really think he was the Creeping Shadow we saw in the churchyard?”
Lockwood nodded. “Yes. Though I don’t pretend to understand how, because when we saw him he was see-through, like a spirit. He wasn’t solid, was he? He was hardly there at all. And how does that jibe with him standing in here? We’re miles from Aldbury Castle. I don’t get it.”
I didn’t either.
“Just a few minutes more,” Lockwood said.
We stood there, surrounded by whirling horrors.
All of a sudden I needed to talk to him.
“Lockwood,” I said. “Me leaving.”
“What about it?”
“Really it was all your fault.”
He glanced at me from under his icy hood. “What? How d’you figure that?”
“Because”—I took a deep breath—“because you always risk yourself for me. You always do, don’t you? I realized I put you in danger by being part of the company. Then there was a ghost at Aickmere’s. It showed me the future—it was a future in which you’d died for me. I knew you’d end up killing yourself, and I couldn’t bear that, Lockwood. I just couldn’t bear it. So…” I spoke in a small voice. “I left. That’s why I did it. It’s better this way.”
“So it wasn’t because of Holly, then?”
“Ah! Surprisingly, no. It was because of you.”
“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?”