“And what’s at that corner?” I asked.
“Barry McGill’s Tip Top Fish and Chip Shoppe,” Barnes said. “That’s its name. I don’t eat there myself. And it’s clean. Well, when I say clean, I mean supernaturally so. Its problem is grease, not ectoplasm. Anyway, we’ve taken it apart and found nothing. The shops and houses around it are innocent too. We’ve checked back, and the history of that area is quiet. No obvious plagues or atrocities—which are what we always expect to find at the heart of a cluster. So that’s your precious center, Cubbins.” He tossed the cane onto the table. “What do you say to that?”
“It’s obviously not the center,” George said.
Barnes uttered an oath. “And you know where is, I suppose?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Well, feel free to find it for me. Right, I’ll get you passes to the containment zone, Lockwood, as Miss Wintergarden requested. Try not to get yourself killed, and—more importantly”—Barnes picked up papers and sat back in his chair; he was already moving on to something else—“do your best to keep out of my sight.”
“I’m going in,” Lockwood said, when we were back out in the square a while later, holding passes with the ink still wet. “I want to walk around a bit, get a feel for the place. Don’t worry, I won’t engage with anything. What about you, George?”
George had his faraway look, the one that made him look like a constipated owl. “At the moment,” he said, “it would be a waste of time for me to go in there. I’d rather do a quick errand. Come with me, if you want, Luce. You could be useful.”
I hesitated, looked over at Lockwood. “Depends if Lockwood needs me.”
“Oh, no thanks. I’ll be all right.” His smile was automatic, unengaged. “You go with George. I’ll see you both back home.” A wave, a swish of the coat; he walked away toward the barrier. After a few steps he was lost behind agents, Sensitives, technicians.
I felt a jab in the center of my chest—pain, and anger, too. I spun on my heel, rubbed my hands together in a show of enthusiasm I didn’t altogether feel. “So where are we going, George? Some midnight library?”
“Not quite. I’ll show you.”
He led the way out of the square, south past DEPRAC cordons, down another street strewn with evidence of the protests: discarded placards, bottles, litter of many kinds.
“This is terrible,” I said, stepping among the debris. “People are going mad.”
George stepped over a broken AGENTS KEEP OUT sign. “Are they? I don’t know. They’re scared. They need to let their tension out. Never good to bottle things up—is it, Lucy?”
“I suppose.”
We crossed an empty street. Away to the right I could see another one of the iron barricades—we were following Chelsea’s perimeter toward the Thames.
“So you think Barnes is wrong somehow?” I said. “The center of the super-cluster’s not at the center? How does that work?”
“Well,” George said, “Barnes is making a lot of assumptions. He’s treating this like an ordinary haunting event, when it so plainly isn’t. At this scale, how can it be?”
I didn’t reply. It didn’t matter; after a moment George continued as if I had.
“Let’s think about it,” he said. “On the most basic level, what’s a Source? No one really knows, but let’s call it a weak point, where the barrier between this world and the next has grown thin. We saw that in Kensal Green, didn’t we, with the bone glass. That was a window, somehow. A ghost is tied to the Source. Trauma or violence or injustice of some kind stops a spirit from moving on, and, like a dog tethered to a post, it circles that object or place until someone severs the connection. Okay. So what’s a cluster? There are two kinds. One is when a single terrible event has created a whole lot of ghosts in one fell swoop. Blitz bombs did that, and plague, and there was that hotel in Hampton Wick that had been destroyed in a fire, remember? We found more than twenty crispy-fried Visitors in the abandoned wing. The other kind is when there’s a powerful original haunting that gradually spreads its influence over the area. Its ghosts kill others and so, over many years, a troupe of spirits, from different times and places, is assembled. Combe Carey Hall was a great example of that, and Lavender Lodge. It’s this second type of cluster that DEPRAC’s assuming is going on here.”
“Well, it must be,” I said. “There’s no connection between all the Visitors Dobbs was going on about. They’re all from different times and places.”
George shook his head. “Yeah, but what’s triggering them? Barnes is looking for some key ghost that’s igniting all the other hauntings in this area. But I think he’s missing a trick. These ghosts haven’t been building up slowly; they’ve all become super-active almost overnight. Two months ago the Problem wasn’t any worse here than anywhere else in London. Now we’ve got whole streets being evacuated.” He crossed the street beside me, shoelaces flapping, hands weaving as if physically molding his idea. “What if it isn’t some terrible ancient event that’s igniting all these spirits, but something terrible that’s happening now?”
I looked at him. “Such as what?”
“I haven’t the faintest notion.”
“You mean like lots of people dying?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“People aren’t going missing. There’s no evidence of any disaster going on. Call me picky, George,” I said, “but that doesn’t make any sense at all.”
He stopped and grinned at me. “Nor does Barnes’s theory. That’s what’s so exciting. Anyway, next up,” he went on, “we need a bit of expert advice.”
“One of your powdery old pals from the Archives?”
“On the contrary. We’re going to see Flo Bones.”
I stopped and stared at him. That, I hadn’t expected. Florence Bonnard, aka Flo Bones, was a relic-girl of our acquaintance. She dug for psychic jetsam on the Thames shoreline and sold it on the black market. She had decent psychic abilities, it was true, and had given us invaluable help from time to time; it was also true that she wore garbage bags, slept in a box under London Bridge, and could be smelled two clear blocks away. Tramps had been known to cross the street to get upwind of her. Which would have been acceptable if she’d been sweet and gentle-natured. Sadly, talking to her was like striding naked through a thornbush: not impossible, but there was a definite element of risk.
“Why?” I demanded. “Why are we going to see her?” You can tell I put a bit of emphasis into it.
George took his map out of his pocket. “Because Flo is the unwashed queen of the river, and the river marks the southwestern boundary of the outbreak zone. Look here: the outbreak forms a sort of funnel shape with the Thames along one side. There must have been alterations in activity that Flo will have noticed. I want her perspective on it before we go any further. Will Barnes or Dobbs or anyone have thought to chat with her? I don’t think so.”
“They won’t have chatted to the carrion crows, either, or the foxes on the rubbish dumps,” I said. “Doesn’t necessarily make it worth doing.”