“There’s a chair here. Why don’t you sit down?”
“I don’t want to sit down. What are you, my nursemaid?”
“Well, let’s go find the others. It’s time we met them anyway.”
Lockwood and Kipps were already waiting near the first-floor stairs. We stumbled down the steps to them. “Poor Lucy’s seen something,” Holly Munro said as we drew close. “She’s terrified.”
“I am not terrified.” Where the spectral chill had been, hot rage was now pulsing through my veins; I struggled to keep my voice steady. To be honest, it wasn’t strictly clear that she’d intended to have a dig at me, but I didn’t care right then. “I’m fine, thank you. It was something very strong, that’s all.”
“Tell us, Luce,” Lockwood said.
I told them as best I could.
“Did it look at you?” he asked. “Were you attacked in any way?”
“It didn’t stop or look at me. It just went past—but I’ve never experienced such ghost-lock….And such chill, too—I still feel cold now….” I shivered; I sat down on a step. “The spiders, Lockwood—have you ever seen that before?”
“I’ve not. There’ve been cases, though, haven’t there, Kipps?”
“Red Lodge, famously,” Kipps said. “And at Chislehurst Caverns back in ’88. Others, maybe. One or two. Not many.”
“What the hell was it doing? The way it was crawling along the floor…God…”
“I think she should leave,” Holly Munro said abruptly. “She’s in no state to go on.”
“Like you could know that!” I cried. “Like you could sense anything! You were standing right next to me, and you didn’t pick up any of the chill or the creeping fear! You weren’t ghost-locked at all!”
“You make it sound as if that’s a bad thing,” Holly said.
“Oh, give me a break.”
“What was that?” It was Lockwood who’d spoken, but we’d all spun around. One of the clothes racks on the far side of the room had tumbled over with a crash. A shadow came lurching toward us: Kate Godwin, rapier out, blond hair disarranged. Her usual cool self-possession was gone.
She halted by us, white-faced, breathing hard. “Have you seen Bobby?”
We stared at her. “How can you have lost him?” Kipps said. “I only looked in on you five minutes ago.”
“Five minutes? More like hours. I’ve been searching all over…I can’t find him.”
“What time is it?” Holly said. “I can’t tell how long we’ve been here either.”
I looked at my watch and felt a new stab of fear. “The hands have stopped.”
Kipps cursed. “Mine have gone backward.”
“Everyone calm down,” Lockwood said. “Forget the time. The entities here are playing tricks on us. Kate, tell us what happened.”
Kate Godwin pushed her bangs back. Her blue eyes, bright, angry, and distressed, flickered between us; she couldn’t keep them still. “We got to the top floor, furniture department, all the sofas and things. We started looking around. I heard a voice again—it distracted me. It sounded like—well, it doesn’t matter what it sounded like. I followed it a short way. Then Bobby shouted that he’d seen something. He sounded…odd. I looked around—he was running off into the dark. I went after him…but he’d gone. Gone, Quill.” She looked as if she were about to cry.
“For heaven’s sake,” Kipps said. “I thought we told you to stay together.”
Her face twisted. “We were staying together! But then he—”
“It’s all right,” Lockwood said. “We’ll find him. What was this voice you heard?”
She hesitated, glanced over at Kipps. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Not good enough,” I snapped. “You’re part of a bigger team now. You need to tell us everything.”
Kate Godwin swore. “Don’t order me about, Carlyle. If you must know, I thought I heard Ned Shaw.”
Kipps gave a start. “Kate, Ned died miles from here. And we…we followed proper procedures, with iron and everything. He can’t have…he can’t have come back.”
“How clearly did you hear his voice?” Lockwood asked.
Kate Godwin shook her head disgustedly. “Quite obviously I can’t have. I must be going mad. It’s the kind of nonsense Carlyle pulls. But Bobby…”
“Yes, we need to find him fast. But before that we should—George!”
Out of the dark, two more hurrying figures: George’s low-slung form followed by the taller, even more shapeless outline of Flo Bones in her whopping coat. They looked like two melting marshmallows, both flushed and breathing hard.
“There’s weird things going on, Lockwood,” George began. “Flo’s just seen something in the basement—not one of these ordinary Shades, but something with the semblance of—Who was it, Flo?”
Unlike Kate Godwin, unlike Kipps, unlike—it has to be admitted—me (my heart was still beating fast; I still saw the vision of that horrid, dragging thing), Flo Bones seemed her usual calm and caustic self. “The name wouldn’t mean anything to you,” she said crisply. “But I can tell you the essential point.” She lifted her straw hat and scratched at a clump of hair. “It was someone dear to me and also dead. I felt a strong desire to follow the apparition…but Cubbins, here, threw a salt-bomb and pulled me back.”
“Great work, George….” Lockwood spoke slowly; he looked around at us all. “Taken alongside Kate’s experience, I’m beginning to wonder if we might be dealing with—”
“With a Fetch,” George said. “A ghost that makes a psychic bond with the onlooker, and takes on the guise of someone closely connected to them. Might be someone living, might be someone dead. Either way, it’s really disorienting. It feeds off something that’s uppermost in the mind, so if you’re fixated on something, or grieving, then you’re particularly vulnerable.”
“Doesn’t explain what I saw,” I said.
“Maybe not, but Kate heard Ned Shaw,” Holly said. “And we think that Vernon may have seen something that made him act oddly too. He’s gone off: we don’t know where.”
“And we need to find him,” Godwin snapped. She gave a sudden cry. “What are we doing hanging around, yabbering like this? I don’t care if it’s a Fetch or a tiny Glimmer! We’ve got to get on with it!” She made a sudden movement toward the stairs.
Holly put out an arm. “Wait. Not on your own.”
“Get your hands off me.”
A ringing sound interrupted us. Lockwood was rapping his rapier on the glass top of a display case. “Listen to you! You’re arguing over nothing. We’re forgetting the first rule of entering a haunted location: Remain calm. Whatever we’re dealing with, we’re risking its feeding on our emotions.” He fixed his rapier to his belt. “Sorry as I am to say it, we’re out of our depth here. The Source is well hidden, and far too powerful. We need to find Vernon and get out.”
“That means splitting up again,” Kipps said. “If we’re searching.”
“I know, and I don’t like it, but I don’t see how it can be helped.”
“Agreed. But Kate comes with us.”
“Fine. George and Flo, Lucy and Holly, you stick to your pairs. Whoever finds Bobby lets off a flare, and the rest of us will join you right away. Then we hit the exit. No one lets anyone else stray off alone, or get distracted by any sound or shape. That’s an order. Act at all times as if you’re joined at the hip. Questions?”
Holly and I looked at one another, but said nothing.
The groups dispersed. Lockwood hung back, waiting for me.
“You’re very pale, Lucy,” he said. “This thing you saw—”
I held up my hand. “I’m not going to back out. We need to find Vernon. It’s a race against time.”
“I knew you’d say that. I know how strong you are. Okay, then—but be careful.”
“It’s not a problem,” I said. “Only—do you really want me to go with Holly again?”
He grinned at me. “Of course. You complement each other.”
/> “We so don’t. We never say nice things about each other.”
He rolled his eyes. “Complement, not compliment! With an E, Lucy. Yes, obviously I know you never say nice things about her—that would be too easy. The other way around? You’d be surprised. But you make a good team anyhow, whether you like it or not.” He turned aside. “Now, shut up and get going.”
Well, it was a good-bye of sorts. We went our separate ways.
Hunting for a fellow agent in a haunted building is never much fun. It complicates matters. Not only were we still keeping psychic watch (we had to: the drifting Shades that thronged the halls kept pace with us, never drawing too close, but never dispersing, either; and we knew other presences prowled the echoing halls), we had to exert all our ordinary senses for sight or sound of Bobby Vernon, too. The two activities were not really compatible: when we concentrated on one, we neglected the other, which consistently increased our underlying anxiety and alarm.
I particularly disliked the open halls and the blank, dark spaces at the ends of aisles. I kept expecting to see the crawling figure, far off and coming after me.
The strain of being doubly alert soon told. Holly and I lapsed into sullen silence, communicating mainly by gestures. We hurried through Cosmetics and Visitor Defenses on the ground floor, then climbed the backstairs at the north end of the building right up to the top floor. Office Supplies was empty both of Visitors and Bobby Vernon, and so were the Aickmere meeting rooms. By unspoken agreement we then descended to the third floor, which was where he’d disappeared, and tight arrangements of sofas, chairs, and tables spread out in jumbled parodies of real homes. Sometimes we called out for him, softly, instinctively unhappy at disturbing the silence; mostly we just listened. We looked in closets, chests, and storerooms. Sometimes we saw the others at a distance, or heard them calling; but all sounds and all shapes were suspect now, and we kept away from them. Bobby Vernon was nowhere to be seen.
We arrived at the elevator lobby, and the main stairs. “No good,” Holly Munro said. “We’ll try the next floor down.”
The skull in my backpack had been quiet for some time, since before I’d seen the apparition and its train of spiders. Now I felt its presence stirring at my back.
“If you leave him now,” it said, “he’ll die.”
“But he’s not up here.” I ignored Holly Munro’s baffled look; to her it sounded like I was talking to the empty air. “We’ve tried everywhere.”
“Have you?”
I looked around the lobby. Stairs, walls…creamy marble and mahogany. Behind us the two brass elevator doors gleamed. The power was off. There was no point looking there; Vernon would have been unable to take the elevators, or even open the doors.
Even so…I stepped close to the doors, put my ear to them. It seemed I heard a moan, a muffled cry.
“Bobby?” I said. “Can you hear me?”
“He can’t be in there.” Holly Munro stepped close. “The electricity—”
“Quiet. I think he answered. I heard a voice.”
I stabbed at the buttons on the wall. They were dead and unresponsive, but I had an alternative in my bag.
“A crowbar?” Holly hung back. “Do you think that Mr. Aickmere—”
“Stuff Aickmere! He said this place had no ghosts! Shut up and help me shove.”
I slammed the bar in between the metal doors and strained to pry them apart. Grim-faced, not looking at me, Holly grasped the metal too. We exerted our strength. At first we made not the slightest impression; then something internal made a reluctant extended cracking sound. The doors slid open—a small distance, perhaps a quarter of their width. But it was enough.
Inside: blackness. And a feeble moaning, coming from below.
My penlight showed the hollow interior of the shaft: oil-stained bricks and loops of black cables, but not the elevator itself. When we craned our heads out over the drop, we saw the roof of the car about six feet below. And on it, curled in a forlorn ball, with his knees drawn up and his arms tightly wound about his spindly knees, was Bobby Vernon. He looked in bad shape.
“What the hell happened to him?” I said. “Think he’s ghost-touched?”
“No. But see the bruise on his face?”
Vernon’s eyes rolled upward, winking and twitching in the beam of the penlight. He coughed raggedly. “I hurt my head; think my leg’s busted.”
“Oh, great…” Something made my skin crawl. I looked back into the darkness of the Furniture Hall. The blackness there seemed to swirl. “How are we going to get him out?”
“One of us could slip in there,” Holly said. “It should probably be me.”
“Why? Why? You were looking at the width of my hips then, weren’t you?”
“Of course not. You hold the doors open. You’re much stronger and burlier than me.” Holly shimmied through the doors, turned to face me, bent to grip the edge, and with surprising agility jumped down into the dark.
I jammed the crowbar into the aperture, fixing the doors open, and flourished the penlight through the hole. She was crouching beside Vernon, touching his leg.
“What happened to you, Bobby?” she asked.
“Ned. I saw Ned….”
“Ned Shaw?” I looked down at Holly. “That’s their dead friend.”
“I saw him…he was standing in the dark, smiling at me….” Vernon coughed his ragged cough again; his voice was weak. “I felt I had to go to him….I don’t know. He didn’t turn away, but he sort of receded, flowed away from me, past all the tables and chairs. I followed….He went into the elevator—it was all lit up, I swear. Doors open, lights on. He stood there waiting for me, smiling. I walked in….Then the lights just went out and the elevator wasn’t there. I fell. Hit my head. My leg hurts….”
“It’s all right,” Holly said. She squeezed his hand. “You’ll be fine.”
Annoyance flared in me. “Bobby, you’re an idiot. Holly—can you help him stand? I could pull him up, maybe, if I grab him.”
“I can try.” She did so; plenty of groans and whimpers ensued.
“Better hurry, Lucy….” The skull’s whisper was casualness itself. “Something’s coming.”
“I know. I feel it. Bobby—hold out your hands. I can reach you, pull you up.”
He was vertical now, draped on Holly, one leg raised, hobbling and squinting like a poor imitation of a pirate. “I can’t…I’m too weak.”
“You’re not too weak to lift your arms.” I was on my hands and knees now, reaching between the doors. “Come on…hurry it up.”
He lifted a frail hand; a ninety-four-year-old dowager summoning a servant to refill her cup of tea would have raised her arm more vigorously. I swiped at it and missed.
“We might need to get Lockwood,” Holly Munro said.
“There’s no time….” I looked back into the dark. “Do it, Vernon.”
My second swipe struck home. I grabbed his wrist. Launching myself backward, I hoisted him up, ignoring his cries of pain. A moment later Vernon’s face, bruised and groggy-looking, appeared in the aperture. I heaved—out came his spindly shoulders, his pigeon-chest…
“Oh, hell,” I said. “He’s stuck.”
Holly gave a squeak from below. “How can he be stuck? He’s thinner than me.”
“I don’t know….” My eyes swiveled. Away among the darkened furniture, amid those blank and meaningless arrangements of armchairs and settees, a voice came calling. “Lucy…”
“Help me!” I shouted. “Push his backside! Get him out of there.”
“I’m not pushing his backside!”
“There’s a Visitor coming, Holly. Why is he wedged?”
“I don’t know! Oh, I do! He’s got his work belt caught.”
“Well, can you free it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know….I’m trying to reach….”
I still had one hand clasped on Vernon’s wrist. With my other, I got my rapier out. Away in the hall I heard a rhythmic scraping….It sound
ed like something approaching on bony hands and knees.
“Holly…”
“I’ve never taken off someone else’s belt before! You have no idea how uncomfortable this makes me!”
I stared beyond the arch. Was that a rustling of a thousand tiny legs?
“Holly…”
“There! I’ve done it! Quick! Pull! Pull!”
I heaved once more. This time Bobby Vernon came free like a knobbly-kneed knife through butter. He popped out so fast, I fell over on my back.
A moment more, and I was scrabbling for Holly, helping her up too. Her clothes were oily, her sleeve torn.
Vernon was lolling on the floor. He was in a bad way, eyes tight shut, and moaning. I grasped him under the arms. “Holly—stairs. We need to go.”
Through the arch the shuffling sound and its soft, attendant scuffling were growing very loud. I knew that at any moment something hateful would emerge into the light.
She grasped Vernon’s ankles, and together we picked him up. He didn’t weigh too much, but it was difficult enough. It was a good thing it was him, and not George.
A few spiders skittered through the arch, out into the lobby. Then we were around the corner and starting down the stairs.
In Men’s Wear, on the floor below, we stopped, shoulders aching, desperately out of breath. We put Vernon on the floor in the center of an aisle, midway between clothes racks and a checkout counter. The air was brittle, cold; the fog high enough to wind around our calves. Vernon lay in it as in a milk bath. I took a small lantern from my pack; we lit it, looking at the oily pallor of his face. It was quiet. There were Shades clustering far off among the aisles, but they kept their distance as before. Both Holly and I stood rigid, staring, letting the panic wash over us; the adrenaline ebbed quickly, leaving us weary and irritable.
“He’s bleeding,” Holly said. “I have a first-aid kit. Shall I—?”
“Oh, you might as well, yeah. You’re the expert.”
She did swift, efficient things with bandages. I stood with my jaw clamped, guarding them both, watching the way the shadows moved inward, pressing in against the lantern.
Holly was deft, careful, and knew what she was doing. It gave me a sour feeling to watch her. Lockwood had said we complemented each other. Yet another way in which he was just so wrong.