“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 light. 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.”