It turned out that the paper I’d found was the ghost’s confession—or at least, it was the confession of someone named Arabella Crowley, written in 1837, a date that roughly matched the Specter’s clothes. It seemed she’d smothered her husband in his sleep and gotten away with it. Her guilty conscience had kept her spirit from its rest; now that the document had been found and her crime revealed, the ghost was unlikely to return.
That was my interpretation, anyway. Lockwood took no chances. The following morning he had the fragments of windowpane incinerated in Clerkenwell Furnaces, and he encouraged Mrs. Peters to have the armoire broken up as well. Slightly to my annoyance, he repeated his orders to me not to try communicating with Visitors that weren’t safely constrained. Of course I understood why he was cautious—his sister’s fate loomed heavily over him—but to my mind, he overstated the risks. I was increasingly confident that my Talent could bypass such anxieties.
Over the next few days, new cases continued to come in thick and fast for Lockwood & Co. Lockwood, George, and I continued tackling them separately.
This led to problems. For a start, our hectic schedule meant that we had little time to research any job in advance, an omission that was always dangerous. One night Lockwood was nearly ghost-touched at a church near Old Street. He had cornered a Phantasm beside the altar and almost missed a second one creeping up from behind. If he had read up on the history of the church beforehand, he would have known it was haunted by murdered twins.
Fatigue was an issue, too. George was ambushed by a Lurker he hadn’t spotted near Whitechapel Lock, and he only escaped by jumping headfirst into the canal. I fell asleep during a stakeout in a bakery and totally missed a charred ghost emerging from the oven. The sudden smell of roasted meat woke me just as it was reaching for my face with blackened fingers, much to the amusement of the whispering skull—which had been watching from its jar but hadn’t said anything.
Our narrow escapes bothered Lockwood, who saw it as yet further proof that we were undermanned and overworked. No doubt he was right, but I was more interested in the freedom that my solitary expeditions gave me. I was waiting to make a proper psychic connection with a ghost—and it wasn’t long before I got precisely that opportunity.
My appointment was with a family in apartment number 21 (South Block), Bermuda Court, Whitechapel. It was the housing project case, the one I’d been stuck with because of the dibs rule. It had been postponed twice due to client illness, and I nearly couldn’t take it on the third time, either, because I’d already booked train tickets to go back home to see my family. I hadn’t set eyes on my mother or sisters since coming to London eighteen months before. Though I viewed the trip with mixed feelings, Lockwood had given me a week off, and I wasn’t going to rearrange that for a job that involved climbing lots of stairs.
I agreed to pop in the night before I left. Lockwood and George were busy with other cases, so I took the skull along. It provided company, of a disagreeable, unsavory sort. If nothing else, its jabbering helped keep the silences at bay.
Bermuda Court proved to be one of those big concrete housing projects they’d built after World War II. It had four blocks of apartments arranged around a grassy yard, each with external stairs and walkways running around the sides. The walkways acted as protection against the weather but also cast the doors and windows of the flats into perpetual shadow. The surface of the concrete was rough and ugly, dark with rain.
As I’d predicted, the elevators were out. Apartment 21 was only on the fifth floor, but I was out of breath when I arrived. My backpack, weighed down by a certain jar, was killing me.
The light was almost gone. I took a rasping breath and rang the bell.
“Man, you’re unfit,” the skull said in my ear.
“Shut up. I’m in good shape.”
“You’re wheezing like an asthmatic sloth. It would help to lose a little weight. Like that bit on your hips Lockwood’s always going on about.”
“What? He doesn’t—”
But at that moment the clients answered the door.
There was a mother, gaunt and graying; a large, silent, slope-shouldered father; and three small kids, all under six, living together in a unit with five rooms and a narrow hall. Until recently there’d been a sixth person, too: the kids’ grandfather. But he’d died.
Slightly to my surprise, the family didn’t usher me into the living room, which is where such awkward conversations usually take place. Instead, they led me into a tiny kitchen at the end of the hall. Everyone crowded in; I was pushed so tight against the stove, I twice turned a dial with my bottom while I heard their story.
The mother apologized for the uncomfortable surroundings. They did have a living room, she said, but no one went in it after dark. Why? Because the grandfather’s ghost was there. The children had seen him, every night since he’d died, still sitting in his favorite chair. What did he do? Nothing, just sat there. And beforehand, when he was alive? Mostly sat in that same chair, while he wasted away from the sickness he’d refused to get treated. He’d been skin and bones at the end. So light and papery, you’d think a draft would have carried him away.
Did they know why he’d returned? No. Could they guess what he wanted? No. And what had he been like, when alive? At that there was a lot of shuffling of feet. The uncomfortable silence told me much. He was a difficult man, the father said, not generous with his money. He was tight and grasping, the mother added. Would have sold us to the devil, if the devil offered cash. Sad to say, but it was true: they were glad he was gone.
But he wasn’t gone, of course. Or, if he had left, he’d now come back.
They made me tea, and I drank it standing under the single bright light of the kitchen, with the children’s eyes, as wide and green as those of cats, staring up at me. At last I set the cup down in the sink, and there was a sort of collective sighing that the moment had now come. With that they showed me to the living room. I stepped through onto the worn carpet and closed the door behind me.
It was a rectangular room, not large, centered on an electric fireplace. A metal guard ran around the hearth to keep the kids away. I did not switch on the light. A wide window looked out over the grassy wasteland behind the estate. There were lights on in the other units, and an old neon streetlight—left over from the times when ordinary people went out at night—on the path below. Its glow gave shape to my surroundings.
The furniture was of the kind that had been fashionable a couple of decades back. Hard, high-backed chairs with jutting armrests and spindly wooden legs; a low, stiff-sided sofa; side tables; a plain glass cabinet set in a corner. A deep-pile rug had been arranged before the fire. Nothing quite matched. I saw kids’ games stacked in another corner and sensed they’d tried to tidy up for me.
It was chilly in the room—but not ghost-chilly. Not yet. I checked the thermometer on my belt. Fifty-three degrees. I listened but caught only a noise like distant static. I carried my bag over to the sofa below the window and set it quietly on the floor.
The jar, when I pulled it out, was glowing its palest green. The face rotated slowly, eyes glinting in the plasm.