“And you have?” Lockwood asked.
“Oh yes, I see a pattern now.”
Breakfast time, and we were at the kitchen table. But the bowls and jam jars and sticky fragments of toast had been cleared away. We were suited and booted and ready for business; there wasn’t a bathrobe or rumpled T-shirt to be seen. Holly Munro, coming up from her early morning vacuuming of the office, had caught the expectant atmosphere. She produced newly baked honey biscuits from a tin and set them in the center of the Thinking Cloth. We had mugs, tea, and, in George’s case, a manila folder stuffed with documents. Everything was set for him.
It was fortunate, from my point of view, that his moment of inspiration had come now. It allowed me to relegate my experience of the night before to the back of my mind. Or try to. For whenever I looked at Lockwood, so coolly contained and self-assured, the memory of that desperate little voice came rushing back, and set me squirming in my seat. Nor could I forget the echo of that little boy’s violent grief, the fury that had instantly avenged his sister and—years later, in his every action—continued to avenge her.
Well, I’d wanted to understand him better, and now I did. Eavesdropping on his past had been effective. But as I should have expected, it didn’t exactly make me feel too good.
At least there were other things to distract me now.
George opened his folder and selected the topmost paper. This he unfolded and pushed along the table to us. “Here,” he said. “What do you think of this?”
It was a map of the Chelsea district, very similar to the one behind Barnes’s desk, only festooned with George’s indecipherable pencil scrawls. There was the Thames, there was the King’s Road, and there were all the hauntings that had taken place over the last few weeks. Unlike the DEPRAC map, George hadn’t color-coded them. Each was marked with a neat red circle, dozens and dozens of them. In some areas the streets were almost completely obscured by overlapping dots, which merged together like spreading stains.
We stared at it. “Well…” I said at last, “it’s spotty.”
“I looked a bit like that once,” Lockwood remarked, “when I had hives one time. George, I’m sorry. I can’t make out anything there.”
George adjusted his spectacles and grinned. “Of course you can’t. Which is just one of the reasons why poor old Barnes has got things so wrong. So—this is a summary of every supernatural incident that’s been recorded in Chelsea up until a couple of nights ago. Impossible to see a pattern, I agree. The only thing you can hope to do is pinpoint the geographical center—that’s Sydney Street—and hunt there. But we know that’s been a red herring.”
He paused to take one of Holly’s biscuits. Our fragrant assistant was listening to George with rapt attention. We all were. Despite his untucked state, his slouching posture, despite the apparently leisurely manner with which he dunked the biscuit in his tea, excitement crackled around him like forked lightning. The charge had built up in him over weeks of solitary work; now it sprang into all of us unbidden. He pointed at the map with a stubby finger. We leaned helplessly forward.
“One thing you might notice,” George said, “is the shape of the spotty super-cluster. It’s kind of like a squashed rectangle: narrow to the west and wider in the east, like a shoebox that’s been stepped on. And the reason for that is the first clue to what’s going on here. First off, here’s the Thames: the largest mass of running water in London. We know that no ghosts can cross it—so that’s the southern border of the cluster.”
“I think even Barnes knows that,” I said.
“Sure, but look to the north. See here, along the Fulham Road? What’s along here?”
“I know that!” Holly Munro exclaimed. “Iron foundries for the Sunrise Corporation! When I worked for Rotwell, senior management often attended meetings there. I sometimes went with them. There’s a number of small ironworks there.”
“Exactly,” George said. “And not just Sunrise. I think Fairfax Iron’s got some factories in Fulham, too. So the smoke that discharges from all those chimneys settles over that part of London, taking with it tiny particles of iron. And that’s why spectral activity is blocked here. The super-cluster stops at this northern boundary.”
Lockwood whistled. “I see where this is going….So here in the west, down at the squashed end of the rectangle, there’s got to be something else, too, something plugging the gap, stopping the contamination from spreading….”
And then I had it. “The Brompton lavender works!” I said.
We all knew the site. It was the biggest in the city, where they shipped in fresh stuff from the north of England and worked it into perfumes and ointments, or dried it nicely for cushions, displays, and other home defenses. “But it’s down here at Sand’s End, isn’t it?” I went on. I pointed at a great bend, where the river turned south. “There’s a gap between it and the Fulham ironworks. Why can’t the outbreak get through?”
“Because the wind blows off the river and spreads the lavender scent inland,” George said. He chuckled. “It closes off the gap perfectly. So you’ve got the Thames to the south, the iron district to the north, and the lavender factory in the west: three strong geographical influences that stop the haunting from spreading. They act as a kind of funnel that distorts the shape of the cluster. And if the cluster’s distorted, there’s no point in looking for a conventional center to it, is there? Which brings me to this….”
He got out another map and spread it on the table. Lockwood pushed our cups out of the way to make room; Holly put the plate of biscuits on the floor.
It was similar to the first, except that the dots were colored orange, and there were far fewer of them, particularly to the north and east.
“This is the situation one month ago,” George said. “It was already bad, but not nearly as crazy as now. I got most of this from that report Kipps gave me. See how there’s already plenty going on in the middle of the King’s Road? But also in the west, too. And if we go even farther back…” He produced yet another map, this one with only the smallest smattering of green dots. “This is six weeks ago, when it all officially began. See where the center of activity is now?”
“Looks like it’s shifted farther west,” I said, “back along the King’s Road. There’s not so much going on, though.”
“No, it was only just getting started. But here’s the clincher.”
A fourth map. It had the fewest dots of all—just seven, in fact. They were all dark blue, like spots of ice, and all were set in a little bow-shaped arc around the western tip of the King’s Road. “This is two months ago,” George said, “before the whole thing blew up. Nothing special—just a Shade in a launderette, a couple of Tom O’Shadows, a patch or two of Gray Haze….Incredibly minor stuff, scarcely made the local papers at the time—I had to really grub about to find reports of ’em—and they aren’t included in DEPRAC’s tally. Barnes probably wouldn’t consider them to be part of the outbreak at all.” He looked around at us. “But I do. If you start here, and then look at the others in sequence, you’ll see the pattern I’m talking about.”
“It’s a wave,” I said.
“Right. A ripple of supernatural activity spreading from a single focus, flowing out along the only channel available to it, through the heart of Chelsea.”
“And that focus—” Lockwood prompted.
“Is just about here.” George stabbed his finger at a blank portion of the map, around which the seven blue dots circled like an arc of orbiting moons. It was a block on the south side of the King’s Road, right at its western tip, not far from the river and the lavender works. It seemed to be a single large building.