‘No death-glows,’ Lockwood said softly. ‘That’s to be expected, because no one’s died here. Got anything?’
‘Nope,’ George said.
‘I have,’ I said. ‘A faint vibration.’
‘A noise? Voices?’
It bothered me – I couldn’t make it out at all. ‘Just a . . . disturbance. There’s definitely something here.’
‘Keep your eyes and ears open,’ Lockwood said. ‘Right, first thing we do, we put a barrier right around. Then I’m checking out the stone. Don’t want to miss anything, like we did last night.’
George set a lantern on one of the box-tombs, and by its light we took out our lengths of chain. We laid them out around the circumference of the pit. When this was finished, Lockwood stepped over the chains and walked towards the stone, hand ready on his sword. George and I waited, watching the shadows.
Lockwood reached the stone; kneeling abruptly, he brushed the grass aside. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘It’s poor-quality material, badly weathered. Scarcely a quarter of the height of a standard headstone. Hasn’t been laid properly – it’s badly tilted. Someone did this very hurriedly . . .’
He switched on the torch and ran the beam over the surface. Decades of lichen had crusted it, and built up deeply in the letters carved there. ‘Edmund Bickerstaff . . .’ Lockwood read. ‘And this isn’t proper mason’s work. It’s hardly even an inscription. It’s just been scratched by the first tool that came to hand. So we’ve got a rushed, illegal and very amateur burial, which has been here a long time.’
He stood up. And as he did so, there was the gentlest of rustlings. From behind the grave a figure broke free of the darkness and lurched forwards into the lantern-light. George and I cried out; Lockwood leaped to the side, ripping his rapier clear. He twisted as he jumped, landing in the centre of the pit, facing towards the stone.
‘Sorry,’ Mr Albert Joplin said. ‘Did I startle anyone?’
I cursed under my breath; George whistled. Lockwood only exhaled sharply. Mr Joplin stumbled round the edge of the pit. He moved with an awkward, stoop-shouldered gait that reminded me vaguely of a chimp’s; small showers of grey dandruff drifted about him as he rolled along. His spindly arms were clasped across his sheaf of papers, which he pressed protectively against his narrow chest as a mother shields a child.
He pushed his glasses apologetically up his nose. ‘I’m sorry; I got lost coming from the East Gate. Have I missed anything?’
George spoke – and at that moment I was enveloped by a wave of clawing cold. You know when you jump into a swimming pool, and find they haven’t heated it, and the freezing water hits your body? You feel a smack of pain – awful and all over. This was exactly like that. I let out a gasp of shock. And that wasn’t the worst of it – as the cold hit me, my inner ears kicked into life. That vibration I’d sensed before? It was suddenly loud. Behind the hum of George’s voice and Joplin’s chatter, it had become a muffled buzzing, like an approaching cloud of flies.
‘Lockwood . . .’ I began.
Then it was done. My head cleared. The cold vanished. My skin felt red and raw. The noise shrank into the background once again.
‘. . . really quite extraordinary church, Mr Cubbins,’ Joplin was saying. ‘The best brass-rubbings in London. I must show you some time.’
‘Hey!’ This was Lockwood, standing in the centre of the pit. ‘Hey!’ he called. ‘Look what I’ve found! No, not you, please, Mr Joplin – you’d better stay beyond the iron.’
He had his torch trained on the mud beside his feet. Moving slowly, my head still ringing, I crossed the chains with George and went down into the hole. Our boots trod soft, dark mud.
‘Here,’ Lockwood said. ‘What do you make of this?’
At first I made out nothing in the brightness of the beam. Then, as he moved his torch, I saw it: the long hard reddish edge of something, poking out of the mud.
‘Oh,’ George said. ‘That’s weird.’
‘Is it the coffin?’ Little Mr Joplin was hovering beyond the chains, craning his thin neck eagerly. ‘The coffin, Mr Lockwood?’
‘I don’t know . . .’
‘Most coffins I’ve seen are made of wood,’ George murmured. ‘Most Victorian coffins would have long since rotted in the ground. Most are buried at a respectable six feet, with all the proper rites and regulations . . .’
There was a silence. ‘And this?’ Joplin said.
‘Is only four feet down, and has been tipped in at an angle, like they wanted to get shot of it as fast as possible. And it hasn’t rotted because it isn’t made of wood at all. This box is made of iron.’
‘Iron . . .’ Lockwood said. ‘An iron coffin—’
‘Can you hear it?’ I said suddenly. ‘The buzzing of the flies?’
‘But they didn’t have the Problem then,’ George said. ‘What did they need to trap in there?’
7
It took us till midnight to dig the thing out. One of us stood guard, taking readings, while the others laboured with the tools. Every ten minutes we swapped round. We used the spades and picks that had been discarded on the path to cut away the mud from metal, deepen the pit at its centre, and slowly expose the object’s lid and sides.
We rarely spoke. Silence enfolded us like a shroud; we heard nothing but the skrrt, skrrt, skrrt of the tools in the earth. All was still. Occasionally we scattered salt and iron up and down the centre of the pit to keep supernatural forces at bay. It seemed to work. It was two degrees colder in the pit than on the path beyond, but the temperature remained steady. The buzzing noise I’d heard had gone.
Albert Joplin, for whom the mysterious burial exerted a powerful fascination, remained with us for a while, flitting back and forth among the gravestones in a state of high excitement. Finally, as the night darkened and the coffin rose clear of the earth, even he grew cautious; he remembered something important he had to do back at the chapel, and departed. We were alone.
Skrrt, skrrt, skrrt.
At last we finished. The object stood exposed. Lockwood lit another storm lantern and placed it in the mud near the centre of the pit. We stood a short way off, gazing at what we’d found.
An iron box about six feet in length, two feet wide and just over a foot deep.
Not any old box, in other words. As Lockwood had said – an iron coffin.
The sides were still partially caked with soil, grey and sticky-looking. Where the gunge had come away, the surface of the box showed through. Rust bloomed on it like flowers of coral, the colour of dried blood.
Once, presumably, its sides had been clean and straight, but the pressing earth and weight of years had contorted the box so that its vertical edges were skewed, and the top sagged in the middle. I’ve seen lead coffins from the Roman burials they find under the City with the exact same squashed look. One corner of the lid was so warped it had risen away from the side completely, revealing a narrow wedge of darkness.
‘Remind me never to get buried in an iron coffin,’ George said. ‘It gets so tatty.’
‘And it’s no longer doing its job either,’ Lockwood added. ‘Whatever’s inside is finding its way out through that little gap. Are you all right, Lucy?’
I was swaying where I stood. No, I didn’t feel great. My head pounded; I felt nauseous. The buzzing noise was back. I had the sensation of invisible insects running up and down my skin. It was a powerful miasma – that feeling of deep discomfort you often get when a Visitor is near. Powerful, despite all that iron.
‘I’m fine,’ I said briskly. ‘So. Who’s opening it?’
This was the big question. Good agency practice, as set out in the Fittes Manual, dictates that only one person is directly in the line of fire when ‘sealed chambers’ (i.e. tombs, coffins or secret rooms) are opened up. The others stand to the side, weapons at the ready. Rotating this duty fairly is second only to the biscuit rule in terms of importance. It’s a regular point of contention.