For answer, the spade was flung aside. A mud-slaked figure struggled from the hole. ‘It’s no good,’ George said. ‘This is the wrong spot. I’ve been digging for hours. No burial. We’ve made a mistake somehow.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘This is definitely the place. I heard the voice right here.’
‘Sorry, Luce. There’s no one down there.’
‘Well, whose fault is that? You’re the one who said there would be!’
George rubbed his glasses on the last clean portion of his T-shirt. He casually surveyed my ghost. ‘Ooh, yours is a looker,’ he said. ‘What’s she done with her eye?’
‘It’s a man,’ I snapped. ‘They wore their hair long back then, as everyone knows. And don’t change the subject! It’s your research that led us here!’
‘My research, and your Talent,’ George said shortly. ‘I didn’t hear the voice. Now why don’t you put a cork in it, and let’s decide what we need to do.’
OK, maybe I’d been a little ratty, but there’s something about rotting corpses leaping at my face that gets me a bit on edge. And I was right, by the way: George had promised us a body here. He’d found a record of a murderer and sheep-stealer, one John Mallory, hanged at Wimbledon Goose Fair in 1744. Mallory’s execution had been celebrated in a popular chapbook of the time. He had been taken on a tumbrel to a place near Earlsfield crossroads, and strung up on a gibbet, thirty feet high. Afterwards he’d been left ‘to the attention of the crowes and carrion-birds’, before his tattered remains were buried near the spot. This all tied in nicely with the current haunting, in which the sudden appearance of a Wraith on the Common had slightly tarnished the popularity of the local toddler playground. The ghost had been seen close to a patch of scrubby trees; when we discovered that this wood had once been known as ‘Mallory’s End’, we felt we were on the right track. All we had to do now was pinpoint the exact location of the grave.
There had been an oddly unpleasant atmosphere in the wood that night. Its trees, mainly oaks and birches, were crabbed and twisted, their trunks suffocated by skins of grey-green moss. Not one of them seemed quite a normal shape. We’d each used our particular Talents – the psychic senses that are specially tuned to ghostly things. I’d heard strange whisperings, and creaks of timber close enough to make me jump, but neither Lockwood nor George heard anything at all. Lockwood, who has the best Sight, said he glimpsed the silhouette of someone standing far off among the trees. Whenever he turned to look directly, however, the shape had gone.
In the middle of the wood we found a little open space where no trees grew, and here the whispering sound was loud. I traced it carefully back and forth through the long wet grass, until I discovered a mossy stone half buried at the centre of the glade. A cold spot hung above the stone, and spiders’ webs were strung across it. A clammy sensation of unnatural dread affected all three of us; once or twice I heard a disembodied voice muttering close by.
Everything fitted. We guessed the stone marked Mallory’s burial spot. So we laid out our iron chains and set to work, fully expecting to complete the case in half an hour.
Two hours later, this was the score: two ghosts, no bones. Things hadn’t quite gone according to plan.
‘We all need to simmer down,’ Lockwood said, interrupting a short pause in which George and I had been glaring at each other. ‘We’re on the wrong track somehow, and there’s no point carrying on. We’ll pack up and come back another time. The only thing to do now is deal with these Wraiths. What do you think would do it? Flares?’
He moved round to join us, keeping a watchful eye on the second of the two ghosts, which had also drifted near the circle. Like mine, it wore the guise of a decaying corpse, this time sporting a long frock coat and rather jaunty scarlet breeches. Part of its skull appeared to have fallen away, and naked arm-bones protruded from the frilly sleeves. As Lockwood had said, it had no hands.
‘Flares are best,’ I said. ‘Salt bombs won’t do it for Type Twos.’
‘Seems a shame to use up two good magnesium flares when we haven’t even found the Source,’ George said. ‘You know how pricey they are.’
‘We could fend them off with our rapiers,’ Lockwood said.
‘That’s chancy with two Wraiths.’
‘We could chuck some iron filings at them.’
‘I still say it has to be flares.’
All this while the handless ghost had been inching nearer and nearer to the iron chains, half-head tilted querulously, as if listening to our conversation. Now it pressed gently up against the barrier. A fountain of other-light burst skywards; particles of plasm hissed and spat into the soil. We all took a half-step further away.
Not far off, my ghost was also drawing close again. That’s the thing about Wraiths: they’re hungry, they’re malevolent, and they simply don’t give up.
‘Go on, then, Luce,’ Lockwood sighed. ‘Flares it is. You do yours, I’ll do mine, and we’ll call it a night.’
I nodded grimly. ‘Now you’re talking.’ There’s always something satisfying about using Greek Fire outdoors. You can blow things up without fear of repercussion. And since Wraiths are such a repulsive type of Visitor (though Raw-bones and the Limbless push them close), it’s an extra pleasure to deal with them this way. I pulled a metal canister from my belt, and threw it hard on the ground beneath my ghost. The glass seal broke; the blast of iron, salt and magnesium lit the surface of the trees around us for a single white-hot instant – then the night went black again. The Wraith was gone, replaced by clouds of brightly slumping smoke, strange flowers dying in the darkness of the glade. Small magnesium fires dwindled here and there across the grass.
‘Nice,’ Lockwood said. He took his flare from his belt. ‘So that’s one down and one to— What is it, George?’
It was only then that I noticed George’s mouth hanging open in a grotesque and vacuous manner. That in itself isn’t unusual, and wouldn’t normally bother me. Also his eyes were goggling against his spectacles, as if someone were squeezing them from inside; but this too is not unknown. What was concerning was the way his hand was raised, his podgy finger pointing so unsteadily at the woods.
Lockwood and I followed the direction of the finger – and saw.
Away in the darkness, among the twisting trunks and branches, a spectral light was drifting. At its centre hung a rigid, man-shaped form. Its neck was broken; its head lolled sideways. It moved steadily towards us through the trees.
‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘I just blew it up. It can’t have re-formed already.’
‘Must have,’ Lockwood said. ‘I mean, how many gallows Wraiths can there be?’
George made an incoherent noise. His finger rotated; it pointed at another section of the wood. My heart gave a jolt, my stomach turned. Another faint and greenish glow was moving there. And beyond it, almost out of eyeshot, another. And further off . . .
‘Five of them,’ Lockwood said. ‘Five more Wraiths.’
‘Six,’ George said. ‘There’s a little one over there.’
I swallowed. ‘Where can they be coming from?’
Lockwood’s voice remained calm. ‘We’re cut off. What about behind us?’
George’s mound of earth was just beside me. I scrambled to the top and spun three hundred and sixty nervous degrees.
From where I stood I could see the little pool of lantern-light, bounded by the faithful iron chain. Beyond its silvery links, the remaining ghost still bunted at the barrier like a cat outside an aviary. And all around, the night stretched smooth and black and infinite beneath the stars, and through the softness of the midnight wood a host of silent shapes was moving. Six, nine, a dozen, even more . . . each one a thing of rags and bones and glowing other-light, heading in our direction.