“Well, I didn’t know that!”
“Well, I didn’t ask you to know about it, did I? It’s my business!”
“Like Lockwood’s past is your business too?” She glared at me in triumph. “I know you went into that room. I heard you from downstairs.”
“What?” I took a deep breath then, chest painful with rage. And as I did so, there was a small, drawn-out scraping sound from the checkout counter down the aisle. We all looked over: me, Holly, Bobby Vernon on the floor. At first we couldn’t see what had made the sound. Then we noticed that one of the tape dispensers, small, but heavy, made of shiny stone, was moving slowly along the surface of the counter. It went of its own volition, scratching, trembling, scraping across the glass.
It reached the side of the cash register, bumped into it, once, twice, and then again, as if seeking a way past. Then, as we watched, it began to rise up the cash register, pressing hard against it, shuddering and screeching. When it got to the top, it flipped slowly onto its side, paused, and then, with sudden violence, shot along and over the edge, to fall back down onto the glass counter with a violent crack.
We stood there, staring. Suddenly, in the silence, I could feel immense pressure stabbing at my ears. It was like a great wave suddenly hung over us, quivering, only momentarily frozen; we were in its shadow.
“Oops.” That was the skull.
“Now you’ve done it,” Bobby Vernon said.
Holly Munro and I looked at one another. Just looked. We didn’t bother trying girly smiles or anything. It was too late for that.
Too late for anything, but we gave it a go.
No sooner had the tape dispenser hit the glass than Holly and I dived behind the nearest available shelter. It was a low display case, like a kind of open-topped table, stuffed with a hundred varieties of golf socks. Holly and I crouched there, bent close, our faces nearly touching. Bobby Vernon was crumpled between us, half-conscious, breathing heavily.
It was very quiet in the room now. True, the psychic echo of our argument rebounded between the walls, on and on and on. Invisible lines of power thrummed in the room, taut as piano wire, heavy with built-up charge. But the only actual sound was a soft, rhythmic rustling. I peeped up from behind the case and looked over at the desk, at the counter with its jagged crack and the tape dispenser sticking up from the fractured glass like the bow of a sinking ship.
A little stack of papers—brochures, maybe—lay on the glass. One corner of the stack was riffling in a nonexistent wind.
The pages would ripple upward, then fall still, then ripple up again.
I ducked back down.
“Can you see anything?” Holly asked. The terror was plain in her eyes. Her voice shook with the effort of trying to rebuild her shattered emotional calm. I nodded.
She stared at me. A twist of hair had fallen in front of her face; she was chewing the end, eyes wide in the half-dark. “So…so the Fittes Manual says the first thing we have to do is establish Type,” she said.
I knew quite well what the Fittes Manual said. But damp fear had replaced the remains of anger in my belly. I just nodded again. “Yes.”
“We know it’s kinetic,” she breathed. “It moves things around. But is there any kind of apparition?”
I peeped up above the socks again. I could smell the lanolin in the wool, and the cleanness of the plastic packaging. The thought crossed my mind that Lockwood and George both needed socks, and that it would be Christmas soon; my next thought (less pleasantly) was that it was highly unlikely I’d survive the night to get to Christmas. I looked across the hall. It was now empty of all the dark shapes that had clustered there earlier. Either they’d been driven back, or absorbed into the mass of cold, pulsating energy that hung vibrating around us—energy our argument had summoned into being. I ducked my head down once more. “No.”
“No apparition? Oh, so it’s a…so it might just be a…”
“It’s a Poltergeist, Holly. Yes, it is.”
She swallowed. “Okay….”
I dropped Vernon’s leg and reached out to grip her arm. “But it’s not going to be like Cotton Street,” I whispered. “This time it’s going to be fine. You understand that? We’re going to get out of this, Holly. Come on. We can do it. We just need to get down two floors and across to the entrance. That’s not too far, is it? We do it quietly, and we do it carefully, and we don’t attract its attention.”
Over on the distant desk, the papers rippled, on-off, on-off, their hum soft and rhythmic like the purring of a giant cat.
“But Poltergeists…”
“Poltergeists are blind, Holly. They respond to emotion, noise, and stress. So listen to me. We make for the back stairs—they’re the closest. We go down to the ground floor and we find the others. We do it all step by step, stage by stage, very quietly and very calmly, and we never, ever panic. If we keep everything nice and neutral, it’s likely it won’t even notice us again.”
I gazed at her steadily in what I hoped was a calm, reassuring manner. On balance it was probably more a wild-eyed lunatic stare.
“Good luck with that….” Bobby Vernon said.
He was only half-conscious, but he knew. Poltergeists, you see…Here’s the thing: they’re bad. Hard to deal with, hard to pin down. Impossible to control. Where other Type Two Visitors always give you something to aim at, Poltergeists have no physical manifestation at all. No apparition, no substance, no shadow. This, for agents, is a major disadvantage. It doesn’t matter how faint a Phantasm, say, might be; once you’ve locked on to its shimmering translucent form, you can lay salt, strew iron, or lob flares to your heart’s content. A Raw-bones may make your bowels twist tight in abject terror, but at least you’re never in any doubt about where it is. That’s simply not the case with a Poltergeist. It’s everywhere and nowhere, and all around you, and more than any other ghost it feeds off every drop of emotion you give out. It feeds off it and uses it to move things. Just a small amount of rage or sadness can fuel its power.
Just a small amount…
Oh, God. What had we done?
What had I done, more to the point? I felt sick; I closed my eyes.
“Lucy?” Holly’s hand brushed my knee. She was giving me a wobbly grin. “It’ll be all right, you said? So…what do we do?”
I felt a flush of gratitude to her. My answering grin was probably equally wonky, and watery as hell. I jerked my head along the aisle toward the back staircase at the far end of the floor. “We get up—very slowly….We retreat a few yards at a time, along toward those doors. We just walk, we don’t hurry. We keep our heart rates down.”
“I can’t….It’s impossible.”
“Holly, we just have to do our best.”
Standing up was the hardest part. Standing up in plain view. Like I said, Poltergeists respond to sound and emotion, so technically it made no difference whether we were hiding behind a cabinet or wearing top hats and sequins and high-kicking like a pair of excited go-go dancers—provided we did it silently. But it didn’t feel that way. Just the thought of being suddenly exposed to the thing beside the counter made cramps race across my stomach on skittering spider legs. Still, we had no choice.
Whispering to Bobby Vernon to be silent, we both grabbed appropriate parts of him and, on a mouthed count of three, stood up. We stared over at the desk, at the purring pile of papers. Up and down went the pages…up and down in the cold, cold air….So far, so good. The rhythm hadn’t altered. Still, the dark crackled with psychic charge: it seemed that the tiniest movements we made would send shockwaves across the hall.