Lockwood & Co.: The Whispering Skull

SECRETS OF THE CATACOMBS!

BLACK MARKET RING EXPOSED

HORRORS OF THE MADMAN’S HOARD

Inside today: A. J. Lockwood reveals all

For several years, The Times of London has speculated on the existence of a sinister black-market trade dealing in dangerous objects related to the Problem. Accusations and rumours have been rife, but hard evidence has been scanty – until now.

Following yesterday’s news of several arrests in Kensal Green and Bloomsbury, we are now able to report that agents from Lockwood & Co. have discovered and broken up a ring of thieves operating in the respectable heart of the city. In a special interview, Anthony Lockwood Esq. reveals how his intrepid team, aided by several assistants from the Fittes Agency, fought pitched battles with dangerous criminals, and uncovered a hoard of stolen artefacts in a haunted catacomb.

Today Mr Lockwood discusses the full paranormal terrors of this epic investigation, including the horrifying Rat-ghost of Hampstead and the Terror of the Iron Coffin. He also traces the web of clues that led to the exposure and death of Mr Albert Joplin, a well-known archivist, who has since been implicated in at least one murder. ‘He was a man too fascinated by the past,’ Mr Lockwood says. ‘He spent too long rootling in the dark corners of our history. Finally, his obsessions corrupted him and took his sanity. In this troubled age we live in, perhaps this is a lesson for us all.’

Full Lockwood interview: see pages 4-5.

‘House of the Rats’ cut-out-and-keep floor-plan and photos: see pages 6-7.

Can Cemeteries Ever Be Made Safe?: see page 25.

Three days after the final events beneath the chapel, we gathered for elevenses in the basement office at 35 Portland Row. We were in cheerful spirits. We’d had a lot of sleep, and we’d had plenty of attention. The great Fittes Fiftieth Anniversary Party was still the most popular subject in the daily papers, but our adventures had been running it close. Not only that, our cheque from DEPRAC – signed by Inspector Barnes himself – had just cleared in the bank. And it was yet another sunny morning.

Lockwood sat behind his desk, with an enormous mug of coffee at his elbow, sifting through the post. Steam coiled slowly from the mug. He was relaxed, his collar unbuttoned; his jacket hung on the suit of armour we’d been given by a grateful client the month before. Over in the corner George had taken down the big black leather casebook and, with a silver pen, was beginning to write up his account of the Missing Mirror. He had a healthy stack of press cuttings, and a pot of glue.

‘Lot of good stuff to stick in for this one,’ he said. ‘Better than the Wimbledon Wraiths, anyway.’

I set aside The Times. ‘Great interview, Lockwood,’ I said. ‘Though I’m not sure Kipps is going to be super-chuffed at being labelled your “assistant”.’

Lockwood looked wounded. ‘I think he gets quite a decent write-up, all things considered. I’m quite complimentary. He might not have been mentioned at all.’

‘One thing I see you definitely don’t mention is the mirror,’ I said. ‘You talk about Bickerstaff, but only because it was his phantom in the iron coffin. There’s nothing about the bone glass, or what Joplin was really up to.’

‘Well, you can thank Barnes for that.’ Lockwood helped himself to one of the homemade chocolate flapjacks George had rustled up that morning. He was doing a lot of cooking, George, making us all our favourite things as a way of saying sorry. He didn’t have to, really, but neither Lockwood nor I had got round to telling him yet. ‘Barnes expressly forbade me to talk about the mirror,’ Lockwood continued, ‘or about anything it might have done. So, for the press, we had to focus on the whole black-market thing – you know, Winkman and all that. Joplin’s going to be portrayed as a mad eccentric.’ He chewed his flapjack. ‘Which he was, I suppose.’

‘“His obsessions corrupted him,”’ I said, quoting the interview. ‘Like they corrupted Bickerstaff all those years ago.’

‘Yes, just people getting over-curious,’ Lockwood said. ‘Happens all the time . . .’ He glanced at George, who was busy sticking something in the book. ‘Of course, in this case there was something extra going on. The mirror exerted a powerful attraction on anyone exposed to it. Bickerstaff’s ghost did too. Between them, someone like Joplin, who was weak, greedy, and fascinated by such things anyway, was easily driven mad.’

‘But here’s the real question,’ I said. ‘What’s the truth about the mirror? Did it do what Bickerstaff claimed? Could it actually have been a window onto what happens after death? A window on another world?’

Lockwood shook his head. ‘That’s the paradox about all this. You can’t find out the truth without looking in the mirror, and looking in the mirror tends to kill you.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess one way or another it does show you the Other Side.’

‘I think it was a window.’ George looked up from his work. The bruises on his face were still obvious, but the sparkle had returned to his eyes. He had a new pair of glasses on. ‘To me, Bickerstaff’s theory makes a weird kind of sense. Ghosts come into this world via a weak spot. We call that the Source. If you put enough Sources together, just maybe you’ll create a big enough hole to see through. It’s a fascinating idea that—’ He broke off, realizing we were staring at him. ‘Um, that I’m not interested in any more. Who wants another flapjack?’

‘It’s all irrelevant, anyway,’ I said, ‘since I broke the mirror. It’s useless now.’

‘Is it, though?’ George flashed us a dark glance. ‘DEPRAC has the pieces. Maybe they’ll try to put it back together. We don’t know what goes on in Scotland Yard. Or at Fittes House, for that matter. Did you see all those books in that library? They even had Mary Dulac’s pamphlet – and how obscure was that? There could be so much hidden knowledge in that room.’

‘George,’ I said.

‘I know. I’ll shut up now. I’m only talking. I know the mirror was a horrible thing.’

‘Speaking of horrible objects,’ I said, ‘what are we going to do about this one?’ The ghost-jar was on the corner of my desk, covered with a woollen tea-cosy. It had been there for three days. Since the events at Kensal Green the ghost had stubbornly refused to appear; no face, no voice, not even the slightest plasmic glow. The skull sat clamped at the base of the jar, staring out with vacant sockets. There was no sign of the malignant spirit; all the same, for reasons of privacy, we kept the lever on the top tightly closed.

‘Yes,’ Lockwood said. ‘We need to make a decision about that. It actually helped you in the catacombs, you said?’

‘Yeah . . .’ I glared at the silent cosy. It was a stripy orange one that had been knitted by George’s mum and given to Lockwood as a present. It covered the jar quite well. ‘The skull spent half the time cheering because we were about to die,’ I said. ‘But on several occasions it did seem to be vaguely helpful. And right at the end – when the mirror had me, and I could feel myself slipping away – it spoke and snapped me out of it.’ I frowned. ‘Don’t know if it really meant to. If it did, it was probably only because of all the threats I made. We know what a twisted thing it is. In Hampstead it almost got us killed.’

‘So what do we do with it?’ Lockwood said.

‘It’s a Type Three,’ George put in; he spoke almost apologetically. ‘I know I shouldn’t say this, but it’s too important to be destroyed.’

Lockwood sat back in his chair. ‘It’s up to Lucy. She’s the one most affected by it. George is right: the skull may yet be valuable, and we had big ideas about revealing it to the world. But is it truly worth the hassle and the risk?’

I pulled the cosy up and stared into the jar for a moment. ‘If I’m honest,’ I said, ‘the last thing I’d want now is to tell anyone about my connection with this ghost. What would happen? It would be like with Bickerstaff’s mirror, only worse. Everyone would go crazy. DEPRAC would take me off and do endless experiments, trying to find out stuff from the skull. It would be hell. I’d never get any peace. So if you don’t mind, can we keep it quiet for now?’

‘Of course we can,’ Lockwood said. ‘No problem.’

‘As for destroying it,’ I went on, ‘I’m not sure that we should. When I was in the catacombs, I heard the voices of the spirits trapped inside the mirror. They weren’t wicked – just very sad. They weren’t talking to me like the skull does, but they communicated with me, even so. That’s why I broke the thing: it’s what they wanted. What I’m saying is, I’m getting better at understanding my Talent; I think it may be getting stronger. And I’ve definitely never had as strong a connection with any other spirit as I have with this skull. So for better or for worse, even though it’s a nasty, conniving, deceitful thing that mixes truth and lies in everything it says, I think we have to keep it here. For the moment. Maybe it’ll be properly useful to us all one day.’

After my little speech we were quiet for a time. George took up his pen. I did some paperwork. Lockwood sat staring at the window, deep in thought.

‘There’s a picture here of that warehouse where Julius Winkman held his auction,’ George said, holding up a clipping. ‘You didn’t tell me the roof was that high.’

‘Yep,’ I said. ‘Our jump was even scarier than Flo Bones’s boat. What time’s Flo coming over this evening, Lockwood?’

‘Six. I still think it’s a bit dangerous inviting her to dinner, but we owe her lots of favours. We’d better get in a ton of liquorice too. By the way, did I tell you I found out how Winkman’s men traced us? Winkman had an informer working at DEPRAC. When Lucy and I got caught at his shop, that first time, he made enquiries and learned which agents had been put on the case. So, after the auction, he already had a good idea who we were. He sent men after us, and they tailed us to the cemetery.’

‘It’s not very nice to think that Winkman knows our names,’ George said.

‘Hopefully he’ll be a bit too busy to worry about that for a while.’

‘There is one other thing,’ I said. It had been at the back of my mind for days, but only now, in the calm and dappled sunlight, did it find space to come forward. ‘When we were in the Fittes library, and we saw Penelope Fittes talking with that man . . . She gave him something – a box; I don’t know if either of you saw.’

‘Not me,’ Lockwood said. ‘My head was turned away.’

‘I was contorted into an impossibly small space under the table,’ George said. ‘You don’t want to know what I was looking at.’

‘Well, I’ve no idea what was in that box,’ I went on, ‘but it had a symbol printed on the outside. George – you remember those goggles you pinched from Fairfax at Combe Carey Hall?’

‘I not only remember . . .’ George ferreted in a particularly messy corner of his desk. ‘I have them here.’ He held up the goggles: thick and rubbery, with crystal eyepieces. We’d studied them a bit over recent months, but we’d been unable to make much of them.

‘Look at your desk!’ I chided. ‘You are so like Joplin . . . Yes, there – see the little harp design on the lens? That symbol was stamped on Ms Fittes’ box too.’

Lockwood and George regarded it. ‘Curious. It’s not a logo of any company I know,’ Lockwood said. ‘Think it’s some internal department of the Fittes Agency, George?’

‘No. Not an official one, anyway. Come to think of it, the whole meeting was a bit odd. What was it that Ms Fittes and that bloke were discussing? Some group or other? Couldn’t hear too well; my knees were against my ears.’ He took off his new spectacles and lowered them to his jumper, then thought better of it and self-consciously raised them to his nose again.

‘It’s all right,’ I remarked. ‘You’re allowed to rub your glasses. You’re not at all like Joplin, really.’

Lockwood, busy selecting another flapjack, nodded. ‘Nothing like him. He was a weird, friendless sociopath with a morbid death-obsession, while you . . .’ He picked up the plate. ‘Biscuit, Luce?’

‘Thanks.’

‘While I . . .’ George prompted.

Lockwood grinned. ‘Well . . . you have at least two friends, haven’t you?’ He passed the plate across. ‘And that brings me to something I’ve been wanting to say.’

George looked at me. ‘He’s going to tick me off some more.’

‘I think he’s going to boast about the Winkman fight again. The fight we didn’t see.’

‘Yeah, he’ll have fought off four blokes single-handedly now.’

Lockwood held up his hand. ‘No, it’s still three, though one of them was quite big and hairy. The thing is,’ he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about this case. All through it, everyone’s been obsessed with the secrets of the mirror. Joplin, Kipps, us; we all got snared by it. Barnes too. Winkman’s actually the only one with any sense. He didn’t care about the glass, did he? He just tried to sell it. He understood that it was the mystery about it that made it valuable.’ He looked down at the table, as if marshalling his thoughts. ‘Anyway, to keep things brief—’

‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ I said. I winked at George, and crunched on the flapjack.

‘To keep things brief, I’ve decided secrets cause nothing but trouble. There’s a darn sight too many of them and they make things worse, not better. So. I’ve come to a decision. I want to show you both something.’

I stopped crunching.

‘Oh God, you haven’t got some dodgy tattoos, have you?’ George said. ‘I’ve only just got over Carver’s ones.’

‘No, it’s not tattoos,’ Lockwood said. He gave a smile, but there was sadness in it. ‘If you’re not doing anything, I could show you now.’

He got up, and crossed the room towards the arched doorway. George and I, suddenly quiet, rose and followed him. George’s eyes scanned mine. I realized that my hands were shaking.

We left the office, with its desks and streams of sunlight. We spiralled up the iron steps, above the washing baskets and strings of drying laundry; came out into the kitchen, where last night’s dishes lay undone. We went out into the hall, where a brand-new Arabian rug stretched towards the door. We walked below the hanging masks and ghost-catchers, turned at the foot of the stairs, and began to climb again. The messy coat-rack, the living room, the open library door . . . My senses were alive to it all. We passed through all the clutter of the house we shared – ordinary things, familiar things, that might in moments have their meanings changed, subtly and for ever, by whatever it was we were about to see.

The landing, which only has one narrow window, was as dim and shady as ever. The bedroom doors were closed. As usual, one of George’s damp bath-towels was draped unpleasantly over a radiator. From an open window somewhere came birdsong, very beautiful, very loud.

Lockwood stopped outside the forbidden door. He put his hands in his pockets. ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘It’s been a while since I gave you both your tours, and . . . well, we never exactly completed them, did we? I thought you might like to see in here.’

We stared at the ordinary door, its faded label mark no different from before. ‘Well, yeah . . .’ I began. ‘But only if you . . .’

He nodded. ‘Just turn the handle, walk right in.’

‘Hasn’t it got some kind of secret lock?’ George said. ‘I always assumed there might be some clever man-trap built into it – maybe a guillotine thing that shoots down as you step through? No? Was I over-thinking it?’

‘I’m afraid you were. There’s nothing. I trusted you both, of course.’

We stared at the door.

‘Yes, but Lockwood,’ I said suddenly, ‘all that stuff about secrets works both ways. So what if we’re curious? If you’re not comfortable with it, there’s no reason why we have to know.’

It was the old Lockwood smile again; the landing grew much brighter. ‘It’s fine. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while now. Somehow, I never got round to it. But when the skull started whispering to you about it, I knew the time had come. Anyway, let me do the honours for you.’

The skull, in so many things, was a liar and a cheat, but it could speak the truth too. It had told us the location of the Bickerstaff papers, casually forgetting to mention the ghost that waited there. At Kensal Green it had helped me access the catacombs, then crowed with delight when I almost died. Its truths, in other words, carried dangers. And it had told the truth about this room.

As Lockwood pulled open the door, we saw that its inner side was thickly lined with strips of iron, carefully nailed into the wood. They were there to block the psychic radiance that now burst out from inside.

A heavy curtain spanned the window opposite, muffling the daylight, keeping the bedroom dark. The air was close and strong, and smelled heavily of lavender.

At first it was difficult to make out anything at all. But as George and I stood there in the doorway, we began to see the glint of silver charms hanging on the walls.

Our eyes adjusted; we gazed at what was in the room. And then I felt the floor pitch under me, as if we were suddenly at sea. George cleared his throat. I put out my hand to clench his arm.

Lockwood stood slightly behind us, waiting.

‘Your parents?’ I was the first to find my voice.

‘Close,’ Anthony Lockwood said. ‘My sister.’