“It’s angry!” I gasped, ducking under a grasping coil. “I got a connection with the ghost! It’s angry about something!”
“You don’t say?” High above, George raised his knees to avoid the thrashing tentacles. “Your sensitivity is amazing, Luce. How I wish I had your Talent.”
“Yes, that isn’t the most surprising insight you’ve ever given us.” Lockwood bent over his bag. “I’ll get a Seal. Meanwhile, you might just want to rescue George….”
“Anytime you like,” George said. “No hurry.” His position was looking precarious. He still dangled by one hand, and the fingers of that hand were slipping fast.
Spinning my necklace, I leaped between the coils, feeling them dart aside. I snatched up the rapier as I passed by, skidded under the ladder, and wrenched it bodily forward, dragging its length below George just as his grip gave way.
He fell—and landed on the middle rungs like a scruffy sack of coal. The ladder bowed; I heard it crack. Well, that was better than him breaking his neck. He’d have made such an annoying ghost.
A moment later he’d skittered down the ladder like a fireman down a pole. I tossed him his rapier.
“What’s up there?”
“Dead person. Angry dead person. That’s all you need to know.” Pausing only to adjust his spectacles, he leaped past to attack the coils.
Across the room, Lockwood had brought something out of the bag. “Lucy—I’m going to throw it! Climb up and get ready to catch!” He drew back his hand, then darted aside as a swiping tentacle narrowly missed his face. A flick of the rapier; the coil was gone. “Here it is!” he called. “It’s coming now.”
Lockwood, of course, could throw. I was already moving up the ladder. A small square object came spiraling straight up and over the central beam; down it came, landing right in my hand. Not even a fumble. Close by, George was slashing with his rapier, watching my back, carving coils asunder. I reached the top of the ladder, where it touched the beam.
And the Source was there.
After so many years, it lay with surprising neatness on its secret perch. The cobwebs that fused it to the wood had smoothed out the contours of the bones and buried them under a soft gray shroud. You could see the remains of old-style clothes—a tweed suit, two brown shoes tilted at an angle—and the bone ridges around the dust-filled sockets of the eyes. Strands of dark matter—was it hair or matted cobwebs?—ran like water over the lip of the beam. How had it happened? Had he purposefully climbed up there, or been tucked away (more likely) by a murderer’s careful hand? Now was not the time to worry either way. The dead man’s fury pounded in my mind; below me, in the weaving lantern light, Lockwood and George did battle with the coils.
In those days the Sunrise Corporation provided silver chain nets in plastic boxes, for ease of use. I cracked the lid open, took out the folded net. I let it slip outward until it had fully unfurled between my fingers, thin and loose like an uncooked pastry case, like a shimmering skin of stars.
Silver snuffs out Sources. I flicked it up and over the beam, over the bones and cobwebs, as calmly and casually as a chambermaid making a bed.
The net sank down; the fury winked out of my mind. All at once there was a hole there, an echoing silence. The coils froze; a second later they had faded from the attic like mist from a mountaintop: one moment there, the next gone.
How big the attic seemed without the Changer in it. We stopped dead, right where we were: me sinking down against the ladder, Lockwood and George leaning against the rafters, weary, silent, rapiers gently smoking.
Smoke twisted from one side of Lockwood’s overcoat. His nose had a residue of silver ash on it. My jacket had burned where the plasm touched it. My hair was a nest of cobwebs. George had contrived to tear the seat of his trousers on a nail or something.
We were a total mess. We’d been up all night. We smelled of ectoplasm, salt, and fear. We looked at one another, and grinned.
Then we began laughing.
Down by the hatch, in its green glass prison, the ghostly face looked on in sour disapproval. “Oh, you’re pleased with that fiasco, are you? Typical! I’m ashamed even to be faintly associated with Lockwood & Co. You three really are hopeless.”
But that was just it. We weren’t hopeless. We were good. We were the best.
And we never fully realized it until it was too late.
BED & BREAKFAST—AND MURDER!
HORRIFIC SECRETS OF WHITECHAPEL GUESTHOUSE
BODIES FOUND IN PIT BENEATH GARDEN SHED
Authorities in East London acted yesterday to seal off Lavender Lodge, a guesthouse in Cannon Lane, Whitechapel, after the discovery of human remains on the property. The owners, Mr. Herbert Evans (72) and his wife, Nora (70), have been arrested and charged with murder and robbery, and with failure to disclose a dangerous haunting. A powerful Visitor, located in the attic of the house, has been destroyed.
It is believed that over the last ten years many lodgers may have died of ghost-touch while staying at the Lodge. Mr. and Mrs. Evans then disposed of the corpses in a fruit cellar hidden in the back garden. Police have recovered a large number of watches, jewelry, and other personal effects that were taken from the victims.
The decisive investigation was carried out by the Lockwood & Co. agency, led by Mr. Anthony Lockwood. “Records show that a previous owner of Lavender Lodge vanished in mysterious circumstances more than thirty years ago,” he says. “We think that the mummified body in the attic belonged to him. It was his angry spirit that stalked the house, killing guests as they slept. Mr. and Mrs. Evans took advantage of this for their own personal gain.”
After subduing the ghost, the agents were forced to break a window and climb down a drainpipe to escape the Lodge, before finally confronting the geriatric duo in their kitchen. “Old Evans proved quite handy with a carving knife,” Mr. Lockwood says, “and his wife came at us with a skewer. So we knocked them on the heads with a broom. It was a ticklish moment, but we’re happy to have survived unscathed.”
“And that’s it,” Lockwood said disgustedly. He lowered the newspaper and sat back into his armchair. “That’s all the Times gives us for our trouble. There’s more about the scuffle in the kitchen than there is about the Changer. Doesn’t exactly focus on the important stuff, does it?”
“It’s the ‘unscathed’ bit that I object to,” George said. “That old cow gave me a right old whack. See this horrible red blob?”
I glanced up at him. “I thought your nose always looked like that.”
“No, here, on my forehead. This bruise.”
Lockwood gave an unsympathetic grunt. “Yes, dreadful. What really bothers me is that we only made page seven. No one’s going to notice that. The massive Chelsea outbreak is dominating the news again. All our stuff’s getting lost.”
It was late morning, two days after the Lavender Lodge affair, and we were stretched out in the library of our house in Portland Row, trying to relax. Outside the window a gale was blowing. Portland Row seemed formed of liquid. Trees flexed; rain pattered on the panes. Inside, it was warm; we had the heating on full-blast.