The Empty Grave (Lockwood & Co. #5)(84)

A great misery rose up in me, a welling loneliness that caught me by surprise. ‘Skull, I’m so sorry … I would have done it …’

The shape faded; for a moment the voice lingered. ‘Too late for both of us. I’m trapped, and you’re dead …’

I stared at the blank space where the youth had been. ‘But … I’m not dead …’

‘You might as well be, Lucy. You’re on the Other Side …’

Stumbling back up the hallway, I had to twist my body past big extrusions of ice that had pushed through the cracks in the wall. But the front door was open, and the others were waiting for me under the black sky. Ice was shimmering on their cloaks. It was utterly silent, except for the rasp of my breathing and the crunch of my boots on the path. In subdued tones I told them about my conversation with the skull, and his news of Winkman.

‘Well,’ Lockwood said, ‘I’ve got to say his death isn’t going to weigh too heavily on my conscience.’ He looked off down the road.

‘It’s good news that he’s not hanging around your basement like some victims of violent deaths do,’ Kipps said. ‘Otherwise you’d find his ghost glaring over your shoulder every time you went downstairs to wash your pants. You’d be on an endless repeat cycle.’

‘But where do you think he was going?’ Holly said.

No one answered. We gazed into the still and silent mists.

‘Well, we haven’t got time to stand around wondering,’ I said in a decisive voice. ‘We have somewhere we need to get to. Who knows the quickest way to the Strand?’





21




Our journey across that dark and frozen London had the remorseless, terrible logic of a dream from which it was impossible to wake. It began in mists and silence and ended in a rush of terror, but wrongness and dread hung over it at every step. We walked in places where living feet should never tread; we witnessed things that living eyes should never see. And in so doing, all normal rules were turned upside-down. For they were not our streets to walk in. It was not our London. We trespassed in the city of the dead, and all our skills and Talents counted for nothing.

The first road we walked down was Portland Row. But it wasn’t Portland Row – not with that ferocious, never-ending silence, and the frost on the road, and the roofs and chimney pots merging with that dull black starless sky. The houses were familiar – but the dead light that shone over everything and came from nowhere (there was no moon) rendered them flat and lifeless, as if drawn on giant slabs of cardboard.

There was something false about those buildings. You felt that if you knocked on them with your fist, whole walls would tumble down. The doors were either absent or ajar. They were gaping holes torn in the fabric of the street. None of the windows had curtains; they were stark and blank and staring. It made you believe things were watching you from inside the empty rooms.

But to begin with we saw nobody at all.

We walked down the centre of the road. A faint set of marks stretched ahead of us in the frost – the wandering footprints of a solitary man. We followed them as far as the empty shell of Arif’s, where the wide shop windows hung blank and open, with mist swirling deep inside the carcass of the building. Here the footprints veered away along a side street and were lost to sight. We did not follow them. If it had been Winkman we’d seen, he had taken his own way.

‘We should go left here,’ George whispered. Blooms of ice crusted the lenses of his glasses. His voice didn’t carry well in the thin air. ‘That’s the shortest route.’

‘Good.’ Like mine, Lockwood’s face was pinched with cold. ‘We need to be as quick as we can. The capes are strong, but I don’t know how long they’ll last.’

We walked on. The air was bitter; a dry, dead absence that sucked the life from your lungs and the motion from your blood. It clung to the surface of our cloaks, coating them with ice that creaked and cracked gently as we moved. But it could not penetrate. We existed in fragile bubbles of warmth that sustained us as we hurried on. Even so, the silence bore into our skulls, and the countless watchful windows on every side filled us with a slowly mounting fear.

There were no ghost-lamps in that city. No railings, no cars – nothing of iron – and no running water. The drains and gutters were empty, the runnels dry. Street nameplates were gone, and the signs above the shop fronts carried no legible words. The route we took was familiar to us, but the overarching stillness made it alien. During my previous visit to the Other Side I’d been in open countryside. Here, in central London, the utter silence had even more of a transformative effect. It turned the rows of houses into cliff faces, the streets into a dark labyrinth of canyons and ravines.

Passing the mouth of one such canyon, we saw a figure in the distance. It had a broad-brimmed hat and was limping very slowly in our direction. We hurried onwards, clambering over a pile of rubble from a partially collapsed building that spread out across the street. There was a junction just beyond, and here Lockwood led us abruptly down an alley, away from the main road.

‘What are you doing?’ Kipps hissed. The ice on the tips of his feathers made them bend like mad antennae above his face. ‘This isn’t the quickest way.’

‘I didn’t like the look of that thing in the side road,’ Lockwood said. ‘Also there were more of them in the mist up ahead – didn’t you see? Two grown-ups and a little child. We’ve got to avoid contact at all costs. We can double back further on.’