The Empty Grave (Lockwood & Co. #5)(41)

There was Lockwood, standing where I’d seen him. Arms at his side, relaxed and passive. If he’d noticed me swinging past his nose, it hadn’t affected him much, but he was no longer walking towards the shape. My discarded rope was just flashing back the way it had come and it almost bowled him over. He paid it no heed.

And there, nearby, the headless woman. Or not exactly headless – the head was still frowning at me from mid-air. It was almost in its correct position, but clearly detached from the torso. Its long fair strands of hair coiled round it, slapping against the lacy dress, seeking to bind it back to the stump of the neck.

Even now she wasn’t finished. The lips twisted in a parody of a smile.

‘Come …’

‘You know,’ I said, ‘a lot of trouble would be avoided if people like you just lay down and accepted they were dead.’

I threw a canister of iron, which shattered against the boards; countless filings went racing beneath the ghost’s feet. The nearest particles ignited, surrounding La Belle Dame with a circle of green flames. The figure leaped and jumped in agitation, knocking the head aside. Coils of hair grappled urgently at the bare white shoulders, and with spidery movements resumed hoisting the head towards the body.

Didn’t bother me. I had plenty of canisters. I chucked another one, setting more plasm alight. The apparition shivered, lost its focus. Its set smile began to fall away.

Somewhere far off, a door banged. That would be Holly, not far behind.

The woman held out her hands. ‘Come …’

‘Oh, get lost.’

Maybe I shouldn’t have used the magnesium flare, but I’d had enough of the ghost by then. It was too selfish, too needy, too vacuous. I didn’t want to share psychic space with it a moment longer. And it had tried to take Lockwood from me. Tufnell could always get himself a new stage. The explosion hit it directly from below – flames went right through its body, blowing the head like a kettle lid high into the air. Half the plasm was vaporized instantly in the blast; the remainder was frail and faint, the merest outline, the ghost of a ghost. I watched as it fled across the stage, diminishing as it went, the head pulled after it on strings of plasm. As it went, the bright dress dwindled, the white limbs shrivelled up; the open sword wounds in the body glinted like black stars. It dived towards one of the big wooden cubes, merged into the wood, and vanished.

‘Where is it?’ Black hair streaming behind her, Holly raced across the burning stage. ‘Where is it? Where’d it go?’

I didn’t look at her. ‘That yellow box!’ I said. ‘The Source is in there! Find it! Seal it up!’ With that, I cast the ghost from my mind. I stood in front of Lockwood, looking up at him. How pale and cold his skin was when I took his hand. His eyes were almost blank; almost, but not quite. I could see his consciousness like a twist of smoke, drifting in the depths.

‘Lockwood!’ I slapped him hard across the cheek.

Somewhere behind me came a series of violent crashes. That was Holly, getting to work on the box.

‘Lockwood …’ My voice was cracking. ‘It’s me.’

‘Luce!’ That was Holly too. ‘I found something! I’ve got my silver chain net …’

I spoke softly now. ‘It’s me. It’s Lucy …’

I like to think it was just coincidence that Holly laid the silver net over the Source right then. I like to think it was the sound of my name that brought him back. Who’s going to tell me otherwise? Either way, the twist of smoke rose up and up, and bloomed across the surface of his eyes. Intelligence came with it; intelligence and recognition – and something more than that. He smiled at me.

‘Hey, Luce …’

I slapped him again, sharply and on both cheeks. Take it from me, that’s a hard thing to get right when you’re crying.





11




It was afterwards said that at the very moment Holly wrapped the silver net around the bloodstained tiara hidden in the box – at that very moment, out in Tufnell’s caravan on the far side of the field, little Charley Budd stopped howling, sat up and asked for chicken soup. So the theatre people knew instantly that we’d done the job and the ghost was gone. Their subsequent emergence into the auditorium, step by cautious step, was nicely timed, as we were just battling the fire I’d started on the stage. All hands came to help. By dawn the blaze was out, the theatre safe, and the tiara wrapped ready for destruction in the furnaces. And Sarah Parkins, the stage manager who had built the secret compartment that concealed the Source, and who had promptly admitted to putting it there, was locked in her trailer under the watchful gaze of two of the burliest trapeze artists, awaiting the arrival of the DEPRAC vans.

For Mr Tufnell it was a satisfactory end to the affair, though he groaned to high heaven about the magnesium burns in the centre of the stage. Sarah Parkins’s guilt had likewise dumbfounded him. ‘To think she should be the cause of all this!’ he cried, his face beetroot with emotion. ‘Such betrayal! Such malice! I treated her like a daughter!’

‘Actually, it wasn’t about you,’ Lockwood said. Seeming none the worse for his recent psychic enchainment, Lockwood himself had identified the culprit and invited her to confess. He had subsequently spent half an hour talking to her in the caravan. ‘Sarah told me what happened,’ he went on. ‘It was originally about Sid Morrison. You mentioned yourself, Mr Tufnell, that Sarah had been fond of him, but by your own account he’d fallen head over heels for that Russian trapeze artist with the thighs. Sarah was left rejected, and her heartbreak turned into hatred. She wanted revenge. It so happened that in her work clearing out the prop stores she’d discovered a relic of La Belle Dame’s last performance – the tiara she’d worn for The Sultan’s Revenge. All those years it had been kept in an iron box, which must have suppressed the ghost. Without recognizing its psychic significance, Sarah took it out. Subsequent sightings of the Spectre – and its particular interest in young men – made her realize its potential. She hid the tiara onstage and awaited developments. It wasn’t long before Charley Budd was snared, but Sarah didn’t want him dead – that’s why she saved him. Sid Morrison, a day later, wasn’t so lucky.’