The Empty Grave (Lockwood & Co. #5)(82)

‘I’d cut the chain,’ Lockwood said. ‘Cut it so we can’t get back through.’

We gazed at the broken chain and then at him.

‘What, so we’re stuck here now?’ Kipps demanded. ‘Stuck on the Other Side? When was this part of your master plan?’

Lockwood shook his head. ‘Don’t raise your voice like that. Don’t get angry. They sense emotion. We don’t know what might be listening.’

‘Oh, something might be listening to us now?’ Kipps gave a quiet whoop of rage. ‘Great! That makes it even better! You said we’d be safe here! You said we’d be OK! Now we’re trapped in the land of the dead, with hordes of ravening ghosts just waiting to swoop down on us, and we’re wearing stupid costumes to boot! Congratulations! It’s a terrific plan, Lockwood, one of your very best! You said—’

‘I know what I said. I’m sorry. I didn’t know they’d cut the chain.’

‘You might have thought about that possibility before bringing us here to die!’

Lockwood cursed. ‘Well, if anyone else ever did a bit of thinking besides me—’

‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘Shut up, both of you. This is no time to argue. We need to stick together and think clearly. There must be something we can do.’

We stood in silence in the little bedroom. As I remembered from buildings I’d seen on my last visit to the Other Side, this place had approximately the same geometry as the bedroom in our home, but subtly skewed out of true. The walls looked soft, as if they were about to melt. Seams of ice glistened in cracks in the floor and shone on the surface of our cloaks. The strange flat brightness lit our hunched forms and stricken faces with its cold, indifferent glare.

No one said anything for a time, then Holly stirred. ‘We do have another option,’ she said. ‘How feasible it is, I don’t know.’

‘It’s got to be better than Lockwood’s last appalling plan,’ Kipps said.

Holly smiled faintly. ‘I don’t know about that. Anyway, here it is. We can’t get back through this gate, correct? So there’s no point staying here. The only other chance we have is to locate another gate, and go back through that. Well, we do know that there’s another such gate in London, and we’re pretty sure where it is.’

She looked around at us, her face as calm and unflustered as if she was giving us our weekly schedule of cases, back in the other 35 Portland Row. Lockwood whistled slowly. George let out a noise like a pricked balloon.

‘Fittes House …’ I said. ‘We have to go there.’

Kipps groaned. ‘I take back what I said. Your plan is as bad as Lockwood’s. Worse even.’

But a small smile was broadening on Lockwood’s face. ‘Holly,’ he said, ‘you’re a genius … You’re right. That’s it. That’s what we have to do.’ His voice crackled with excitement. ‘Don’t you see? The layout on the Other Side is pretty much the same as the world we know. So we simply stroll out through that door there. We go downstairs and leave the house and exit into the other Portland Row. It’ll be there, of course, a dark version of the one we live in. Then we set off across London – the other London, I should say. We go to Fittes House. We locate the gate that must be there. Then we step through it, back into the real world!’ He chuckled. ‘And this is the real beauty of it: by doing that, we can catch dear Marissa entirely unawares. We bypass all her defences and catch her red-handed! We can get the proof we need to end all this. In so doing, we’ll have turned desperate defence into triumphant surprise attack.’ Lockwood’s eyes gleamed in the depths of his hood. ‘It’s a brilliant strategy, Holly. Well done.’

She nodded. ‘Thanks – though personally all I really want to do is just get out alive.’

Kipps rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Hold it. From what you and Lucy saw last time, this “other London” isn’t going to be uninhabited.’ He swallowed. ‘It’s not some crummy village with a few dead yokels to worry about. It’s going to be packed … And what about George? How’s he going to cope with this? And how long will our cloaks—?’

‘I’ll be all right,’ George said abruptly. ‘I’ll have to be. What alternative is there?’

‘Lucy? What do you think?’

I was thinking a lot of things, but mostly I was trying to suppress the panic I felt at being trapped on the Other Side. It was the kind of panic that threatened to make you stupid, freeze you rigid where you stood. It was informed by memories of the terrors I’d experienced on my last visit, and also by a horrid sense that the room we were in was getting smaller. I felt suddenly convinced that if we didn’t start moving, I would never find my way to the open air.

‘I think Holly’s right,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to try to find the other gate. Marissa would be a bonus, of course. But right now … please, we’ve got to go.’

Like the bedroom, the landing was an echo of our one in the living world. All its warm, soft details and imperfections had been stripped away. It was blank, empty, glimmering with ice. The walls were bare, their decorations gone; the floor had cracks running through it – thin, curved cracks like veins. Mist filled the stairwell. Silence pummelled our ears.

There was no carpet on the steps; the treads were wooden. Our boots tapped hollowly as we slowly filed downstairs.