My Talents were fast developing. My skill at inner Listening, which had always been good, was growing ever sharper. I heard the whispers of Type Ones, the fragments of speech emitted by Type Twos: few apparitions were entirely silent to me now. My sense of psychic Touch had also deepened. Holding certain objects gave me strong echoes of the past. More and more, I found I had an intuitive feel for the intentions of each ghost; sometimes I could even predict their actions.
All these were rare enough abilities, but they were overshadowed by something deeper – a mystery that hung over all of us at 35 Portland Row, but particularly over me. Seven months before, something had happened that set me apart from Lockwood and George, and all the other agents we competed with. Ever since, my Talent had been the focus of George’s experiments, and our major topic of conversation. Lockwood even believed it might be the foundation of our fortunes, and make us the most celebrated agency in London.
First, though, we had to solve one particular problem.
That problem was sitting on George’s desk, inside a thick glass jar, beneath a jet-black cloth.
It was dangerous and evil, and had the potential to change my life for ever.
It was a skull.
4
George had left the rapier room now and gone into the main office. I followed him in, taking my tea with me, winding my way amongst the debris of our business: piles of old newspapers, bags of salt, neatly stacked chains and boxes of silver seals. Sunlight streamed through the window that looked out onto the little yard, igniting dust particles in the air. On Lockwood’s desk, between the mummified heart and the bottle of gobstoppers, sat our black leather casebook, containing records of every job we’d undertaken. Soon we’d have to write up the Wimbledon Wraiths in there.
George was standing by his desk, staring at it in a glum sort of way. My desk top gets messy fairly often, but this morning George’s was something else. It was a scene of devastation. Burned matches, lavender candles and pools of melted wax littered the surface. A chaos of tangled wires and naked elements spilled forth from a disembowelled electrical heater. In one corner, a blowtorch lay on its side.
At the other end of the desk something else sat hidden under a black satin cloth.
‘Heat didn’t work, I take it?’ I said.
‘No,’ George said. ‘Hopeless. Couldn’t get it hot enough. I’m going to try putting it in daylight today, see if that spurs him on a bit.’
I regarded the shrouded object. ‘You sure? It didn’t do anything before.’
‘Wasn’t so bright then. I’ll take it out into the garden when the noonday sun comes round.’
I tapped my fingers on the desk. Something that I’d been meaning to say for a while, something that had been on my mind, finally came out. ‘You know that sunlight hurts it,’ I said slowly. ‘You know it burns the plasm.’
George nodded. ‘Yep . . . Obviously. That’s the idea.’
‘Yeah, but that’s hardly going to get the thing to talk, is it?’ I said. ‘I mean, don’t you think it’ll be counterproductive? All your methods seem to involve inflicting pain.’
‘So what? It’s a Visitor. Anyway, do Visitors actually feel pain?’ George pulled the cloth away, revealing a glass jar, cylindrical and slightly larger than the average waste-basket. It was sealed at the top with a complex plastic stopper, from which a number of knobs and flanges protruded. George bent close to the jar and flipped a lever, revealing a small rectangular grille within the plastic. He spoke into the grille. ‘Hello in there! Lucy thinks you feel discomfort! I disagree! Care to tell us who’s right?’
He waited. The substance in the jar was dark and still. Something sat motionless in the centre of the murk.
‘It’s daytime,’ I said. ‘Of course it won’t answer.’
George flicked the lever back. ‘It’s not answering out of spite. It’s got a wicked nature. You said as much yourself, after it spoke to you.’
‘We don’t really know, to be honest.’ I stared at the shadow behind the glass. ‘We don’t know anything about it.’
‘Well, we know it told you we were all going to die.’
‘It said “Death is coming”, George. That’s not quite the same thing.’
‘It’s hardly a term of endearment.’ George heaved the tangle of electrical equipment off his desk and dumped it in a box beside his chair. ‘No, it’s hostile to us, Luce. Mustn’t go soft on it now.’
‘I’m not going soft. I just think torturing it isn’t necessarily the way forward. We may need to focus more on its connection with me.’
George gave a noncommittal grunt. ‘Mm. Yes. Your mysterious connection.’
We stood surveying the jar. In ordinary sunlight, like today’s, the glass looked thick and slightly bluish; under moonlight, or artificial illumination, it glinted with a silvery tinge, for this was silver-glass, a ghost-proof material manufactured by the Sunrise Corporation.
And sure enough, within the glass prison was a ghost.
The identity of this spirit was unknown. All that could be certain was that it belonged to the human skull now bolted to the base of the jar. The skull was yellowish-brown and battered, but otherwise unexceptional. It was adult size, but whether a man’s or a woman’s we could not tell. The ghost, being tethered to the skull, was trapped inside the ghost-jar. Most of the time it manifested as a murky greenish plasm that drifted disconsolately behind the glass. Occasionally, and usually at inconvenient moments, such as when you were going past with a hot drink or a full bladder, it congealed violently into a grotesque transparent face, with bulbous nose, goggling eyes and a rubbery mouth of excessive size. This shocking visage would then leer and gape at whoever was in the room. Allegedly George had once seen it blow kisses. Often it seemed to be trying to speak. And it was this apparent ability to communicate that was its central mystery, and why George kept it on his desk.
Visitors, as a rule, don’t talk – at least, not in a very meaningful way. Most of them – the Shades and Lurkers, the Cold Maidens, the Stalkers and other Type Ones – are practically silent, except for a limited repertoire of moans and sighs. Type Twos, more powerful and more dangerous, can sometimes deliver a few half-intelligible words that Listeners like me are able to pick up. These too are often repetitious – imprints on the air that seldom alter, and are often connected to the key emotion that binds the spirit to the earth: terror, anger, or desire for vengeance. What ghosts don’t do, as a rule, is talk properly, except for the legendary Type Threes.
Long ago, Marissa Fittes – one of the first two psychical investigators in Britain – claimed to have encountered certain spirits with which she held full conversations. She mentioned this in several books, and implied (she was never very forthcoming about the details) that they had told her certain secrets: about death, about the soul, about its passage to a place beyond. After her own demise, others had tried to achieve similar results; a few even claimed to have done so, but their accounts were never verified. It became a point of faith among most agents that Type Threes existed, but that they remained almost impossible to find. That’s certainly what I’d believed.
Then the spirit in the jar – that selfsame one with the horrid goggly face – had talked to me.
I had been alone in the basement at the time. I’d knocked over the ghost-jar, twisting one of the levers in its stopper, so that the hidden grille was exposed. And all at once I heard the ghost’s voice talking in my head – really talking, I mean, addressing me by name. It told me things too – vague, unpleasant things of the death’s coming variety – until I turned the lever and shut it up.