The Empty Grave (Lockwood & Co. #5)(66)
He had found the extract he wanted; he already knew the piece by heart. He smoothed out the page and, holding it up to catch the frail light of morning, gave it to me to read:
So the wise men truly converse with the ancestors: that is one point on which they all insist. But there is another point too, even more incredible to the modern ear. When they enter the spirit-houses, so the wise men believe, they are no longer in the mortal world at all, but have passed through to another realm altogether. This is the realm of the ancestors, the land of death, where they can meet ghosts on level terms. ‘How can this be?’ we asked them; ‘how can your mortal bodies withstand the terrible conditions there (for it is not a pleasant place), and would not the proximity of the dead be fatal to you?’
‘All this would indeed be true,’ came the reply, ‘were it not for the stout protection afforded by our cloaks and masks. The precious materials of the cloaks shield our bodies and keep the ancestors from touching us. The bone-masks (formed from the remains of shamans of the past) allow us to see the spirits with clear eyes.’
To our mind, these fragile items look scarcely capable of any of this, but the wise men are confident in their power. Yet even so, speaking with the ancestors is not to be taken lightly. The elders regard it as a most dangerous venture, to be undertaken only in times of crisis, for the dead are roused to great excitement by their arrival, often following them back into the living world. This is why the spirit-houses are built away from the villages, usually across streams.
‘You see what they’re stumbling towards, Lucy?’ Lockwood said. ‘They’re recording the exact same thing that’s going on here – the living travelling to the land of the dead. They’ve spotted everything: the way the dead get stirred up, the importance of having lots of Sources piled together to create a gate through, the need for bodily protection on the Other Side. It’s all there.’
I nodded slowly. ‘The bit about the bone-masks is interesting,’ I said. ‘You think they operate like the goggles Kipps has?’
‘I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, maybe. Though I bet the goggles are copying the masks, in just the same way that those silver capes we nicked are close copies of the original spirit-capes. My poor parents go on to describe the feathered capes in great detail – the way they’re made, the types of silver mesh holding them together … This was a gift for the Orpheus gang, Luce. Whatever techniques they were using beforehand won’t have been a patch on this. They’ve been taking a leaf out of my parents’ book ever since.’
‘They’ve been using their findings?’
‘I’m sure of it. And I’m sure of something else too. They may have been delighted to hear all about the clever techniques used by the shamans, but they wouldn’t have been at all chuffed about another remark in the lecture.’ Lockwood flipped forward a couple of pages, to near the end of the little book. ‘Read this,’ he said. His voice sounded odd.
From what we have seen and heard first-hand, both in the New Guinean hill country and the forests of West Sumatra, we are convinced of the truth of the wise men’s accounts in the matter of their ancestors. More than that, we feel that they have much to teach us about our own problem with our ancestors, much closer to home. We all know that the epidemic of Visitors that Britain endures is mysterious and worsening, without apparent solution. Yet could it be that the prime cause of this crisis is somewhere near us, right under our noses? Are we somehow disturbing these spirits? Could there be a gate such as we have described with mortal traffic going through it? The idea seems absurd, and yet surely it satisfies the evidence. We feel this theory must be explored. Indeed, we devoutly believe that our researches, made at the other ends of the earth, have the potential to unlock great mysteries near at hand.
‘Of course, we know there were spirit-gates near at hand,’ Lockwood said. ‘And we know precisely who’s been going through them. My mother and father hadn’t got a clue. Can you imagine them in that cursed building, giving this talk, with the clocks ticking and those horrible Orpheus people quietly watching them?’ He shuddered. ‘It was the wider picture, the stuff about the Other Side, that interested my mum and dad. The parallels between cultures. They thought, quite reasonably, that these ideas might inspire a bit of public interest at home in Britain. In fact, they planned to give that same lecture to a public audience in Manchester a few days later. The thing they didn’t know, being all excited and eager, and wanting to give their special friends at the society a little preview of their theories, was that they were signing their own death warrants.’
His tired eyes looked up at me; our gazes locked.
‘The accident,’ I said.
‘Given what they were up to, the Orpheus Society would have been very disinclined to have my parents’ lecture heard by the world,’ he said. ‘Which brings me to the second thing I realized. The front page of the pamphlet gives the date of the lecture. It’s just two days before my mother and father were due to travel up to Manchester. In other words,’ Lockwood went on, ‘it’s two days before their car was hit in a freak accident and they were killed in a ball of flame. Two days before they, this lecture and their inconvenient theories were lost to the world for ever.’ He tossed the pamphlet on the floor.
‘It wasn’t an accident,’ I said.