The Empty Grave (Lockwood & Co. #5)(5)
‘No, that’s my job,’ Lockwood said. ‘Your job is to tell me everything so I can make the judgement.’
There was a heavy pause. ‘Do you lot always argue like this?’ Kipps asked.
Lockwood gave a bland smile. ‘Usually. I sometimes think incessant bickering is the oil that lubricates our efficient machine.’
George looked up. ‘You reckon?’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, are you going to pick me up on that as well?’
‘I thought you liked some bickering! You just said—’
‘I don’t like anything that much! Now, can everyone please shut up?’ Lockwood gazed around at us. His dark eyes locked on ours, holding our attention, steadying our collective purpose. ‘Traps or no traps,’ he said, ‘we can handle this. We have two hours to check the tomb, close it up and be ready to go when the sentries change again. Do we want to learn the truth about Penelope Fittes and Marissa? Of course we do! We’ve worked wonders to get here, and we won’t panic now. If we’re right, there won’t be anything to worry about. If we’re wrong, we deal with it, as we always do.’ He smiled. ‘But we won’t be wrong. We’re on the verge of something big here. It’s going to be good!’
Kipps adjusted his goggles dolefully. ‘Since when has anything good happened in a crypt? It’s going to be ropy by definition.’
But Lockwood was already heading down the stairs. Beyond him, light flickered on the iron face. Its thin lips seemed to smile as we descended into the dark.
2
OK, let’s just pause for a moment while we’re still at the top of the stairs. Nothing nasty’s jumped out at us. No traps have been sprung. We’re all alive and well. That makes it a good time to consider just how the five of us (five and a bit, if you include the skull) came to be there at all, descending illegally into the most famous tomb in London.
I don’t mean the mechanics of how we got inside the mausoleum, though that’s a story in itself: the long nights George spent watching the movements of the guards; the weeks Kipps spent shadowing the sergeant with the key; the stealing of the key (this a masterpiece of timing, with Holly distracting the sergeant while Lockwood pinched it from his jacket, took a wax impression and returned it, all in thirty seconds flat); finally the forging of a replica, thanks to an underworld contact of our disreputable friend Flo Bones. I don’t even mean how we snuck in during the changing of the guards.
I mean why we took the risk at all.
For the answer to that we have to go back five months, to a walk that Lockwood and I took through a dark and frozen landscape. This little stroll completely shook up how we operated and changed the way we saw ourselves.
Why? Because, entirely unexpectedly, we had stepped out of our world and into another place. Where was this place? That’s hard to say. Some call it the Other Side; I guess it has other names too, which people in the old religions and the ghost-cults use. But from what I saw it wasn’t a heaven or a hell; just a world very similar to our own, only freezing cold and silent and stretched out under a black sky. The dead walked there, and it was their home – while Lockwood and I were the interlopers. Ours was the unnatural presence in their endless night.
We had ventured there by accident, and only just managed to escape, but we discovered that there were other living souls who had deliberately chosen to explore that forbidden path. One was no less a person than Mr Steve Rotwell, grandson of Tom Rotwell and head of the giant Rotwell Agency. He had been carrying out experiments, sending employees (protected by iron armour) through a gate or portal to the Other Side. His exact purpose we could not tell. When he attempted to silence us, our confrontation ended with Rotwell’s death and the destruction of his secret research facility. The repercussions of this were far-reaching. For a start, Rotwell’s was taken over by its arch-rival, the Fittes Agency, headed by the formidable Ms Penelope Fittes, who swiftly set about establishing herself as the most powerful woman in Britain.
But there were darker consequences too. Our experiences had indicated that there was a strong connection between the activity of spirits – in particular their keenness to return to our world – and the presence of living persons on the Other Side. It seemed that when the land of the dead was invaded, the dead became active, and much more likely to invade the land of the living. This discovery was of vast importance. For more than fifty years the Problem – the epidemic of ghosts infesting Britain – had spread and worsened, confounding all attempts to understand or halt it. We held in our hands a clue to the possible cause, and we itched to spread this news.
Only we couldn’t. Because we’d been forbidden to do so.
This edict had come from none other than Penelope Fittes herself. She didn’t know about the strange journey Lockwood and I had made (we had told nobody but our friends), but she knew something of what we’d discovered at the Rotwell Institute, and she wanted no word of it getting out to the ordinary population. It wasn’t a friendly piece of advice, either, more a coolly delivered threat. We were under no illusions about what would happen to us if we chose to give up our silence and go our own way.
This, by itself, was outrageous enough: the woman at the heart of the fight against the Problem was telling us not to explore its possible cause. Quite what her motive might be was unknown, but it was hard to imagine an innocent explanation. Yet there was something else, something more disturbing still; and for that insight we had the ghost in the jar to thank. Long ago it had spoken with the great Marissa Fittes; now it had seen Penelope – and had big news for us. According to the skull, Penelope was Marissa – they were precisely the same person.