A surge of fear – strong, knife-thin – rose through me. I scrabbled at my belt, switched on my torch, swung it rapidly to and fro.
Just a room, another barren space: bare walls, dusty floorboards. A single window cavity, blocked with bricks. In the centre of the room, a massive table with a metal top.
None of that interested me, because I was alone. Lockwood and George weren’t there.
I spun round, wrenched open the door. My trembling torchlight picked out the pair of them a few steps away. They had their backs to me, their rapiers out; they were staring up the passage.
‘What the hell are you doing out here?’ I said.
‘Didn’t you hear it, Luce?’ Lockwood hissed. ‘The scurrying?’
‘Like rats,’ George whispered. ‘I thought it was coming towards us, but . . .’ He seemed to notice me for the first time, standing in the door. ‘Oh, you’ve been inside.’
‘Of course I have.’ A finger of cold moved down my spine. ‘You came in too, right? You were in the room with me.’
‘No we weren’t. Watch where you’re pointing that torch. The light’s in my eyes.’
‘We thought you were with us here, Luce,’ Lockwood said.
‘No, I went through the door, just like— Are you sure you didn’t follow?’ I remembered the soft shuffling sounds, the invisible presences pressing close. My voice grew tight and forced. ‘I felt you standing next to me . . .’
‘We didn’t notice you go in, Luce. We got distracted by the scurrying.’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t hear it,’ George said.
‘Of course I didn’t hear it!’ I burst out. ‘If I’d heard it, do you think I’d have left you behind and gone in there?!’
Lockwood touched my hand. ‘It’s all right. Calm down. You need to calm down and tell us what’s happened.’
I took a long deep breath to stop myself from shaking. ‘Come in through here and I’ll tell you. From now on, we need to stay very close together. And please, let’s none of us get distracted any more.’
The secret chamber, which we guessed had been Bickerstaff’s workroom, displayed no other immediate psychic traces once we were all inside. Lockwood set a lantern on the sill beneath the bricked-up window; by its light George wandered round the perimeter, inspecting the wall. There was no other exit. Old gas-lamp fixings, rusty and sagging, extended from the bare plaster. The table in the centre was the only furniture, its steel legs bolted to the floor. Its iron top was rough with dust and plaster fragments. Deep grooves ran along the edges, and opened out into spouts projecting over the floor.
Lockwood ran his finger along one groove. ‘Nice little channels,’ he said, ‘for the flow of blood. This is a purpose-built dissection table. Mid nineteenth century. I’ve seen examples at the Royal College of Surgeons. Looks like it was here that good old Dr Bickerstaff experimented with body parts of the deceased. Pity it’s made of iron, Luce, or you might have got some interesting psychic feedback from it.’
I’d been drinking water from my backpack, and was now chewing furiously on a piece of chocolate. I still felt shaken by my experiences at the door, but my fright had hardened into something stronger. If the presences here wanted to warn me off, they’d have to do better than that. I tossed the chocolate wrapper aside. ‘It was in this room that they used to meet,’ I said. ‘A group of men, smoking and talking about their experiments. I know that much already, but I may get more. So hush up. I want to try something.’
I moved to the far wall, well away from the iron surface of the table. There’d been a fireplace here; the grate was choked with birds’ nests, rubble, fragments of wood and plaster. It seemed to me that this was the heart of the room, where Bickerstaff and his companions would have stood and smoked, discussing whatever lay upon the table. Here, if anywhere, the traces might be strong.
I put my fingertips against the plaster of the wall. Cool, damp, even oily to the touch. I closed my eyes, and lost myself. I listened . . .
Sound welled up from the past. I grasped at it; it fell away.
It’s strange how psychic echoes work. They come and go – first strong, then weak; waxing, then subsiding – like they’re a beating heart or rhythmic pulse, deep in the substance of the house. It makes Touch a tricksy, unreliable Talent. You can try the same spot five times and get nothing; on the sixth, you’re knocked off your feet by the power of the psychic recall. I trailed my hand along the walls, tried the fireplace and the blocked-up window, and the only result was dirt-stained fingertips.
Time went by. I heard Lockwood shuffling his feet, George scratching somewhere unmentionable; otherwise they were silent. I had them both well trained.
I was just about to reach in my bag for my pocket-pack of Agents’ Wipes™ (‘Ideal for removing soot, grave-dirt and ectoplasm stains’) when I chanced to brush against the wall beside the door. A thin, sharp shock crackled out like sheet lightning across the back of my hand. I flinched away, and then – because I knew the sensation for what it was – deliberately placed my fingers back on the cold, rough plaster.
At once, as if I’d switched a radio on, I heard voices beside me in the room. I closed my eyes, turned to face the chamber, let my mind fill in the image that the sounds suggested.
A group of men, several of them, stood around the dissecting table. I picked up a general murmur of conversation, laughter, the smell of strong tobacco. There was something in the middle of the room; something on the table. One voice, louder, more assertive than the others, rose above the rest. The hubbub quietened, to be replaced by a solemn round of chinking glasses. The echoes faded.
And swelled again. This time I heard noise from a single throat – a busy, preoccupied whistling, as of someone deeply engaged in a pleasant task. He was sawing something: I heard the rasping of the blade. Silence fell . . . and now there was something else inside the room. I felt its presence in the horrible sense of spectral cold, in the sudden dread that made my teeth rattle in my gums. Also in a hateful sound I’d heard before: the burring wings of innumerable flies.
A voice sounded in the darkness.
‘Try Wilberforce. He’s eager. He’ll do it.’
Instantly the whistling and the sawing noise were gone. But the buzzing grew stronger, and now the terrible cold rose up to engulf me, just as it had three nights before when I stood beside the Bickerstaff grave. I opened my mouth in pain. And as I did so, there suddenly came a single cry from many throats, screamed directly in my ear.
‘Give us back our bones!’
I jerked my hand from the wall. At once, like water sluicing down a drain, the deathly cold was sucked away, and I felt again the clammy warmth of the empty room.
George and Lockwood stood by the table, watching me.
I took my thermos from my bag and drank hot tea before telling them what I’d heard.
‘The sound of the flies,’ I said at last, ‘the desperate cold . . . it was just the same as in the cemetery. Both are to do with the bone glass, I think. Bickerstaff definitely constructed it here.’
Lockwood tapped the surface of the table. ‘To do what, though? That’s the question. You look in the bone glass, and what do you see?’
‘I don’t know. But that idiot made something very bad.’
‘This voice you heard . . .’ George said. ‘Was it Bickerstaff, do you think?’
‘Maybe. But actually I thought it sounded more like—’
It’s never great when one of us breaks off halfway through a sentence like that. It’s always bad news. Generally speaking it means something’s happened, or is very much about to happen, and we have to stop talking or die.
‘Do you hear it?’ I said.
Beyond the half-closed door: a little subtle scraping noise. A limping, shuffling, creeping something coming up the passage, and getting ever closer all the time.