The Empty Grave (Lockwood & Co. #5)(85)
But this was easier said than done. For every street that was empty, there was another with something wandering in the mists. Dark shapes stood at the upstairs windows of hollow houses, staring up towards the sky. Tiny figures sat in frozen sandpits at the edge of city parks. Lines of adults waited on pavements, perhaps queuing for buses that would never come. Men in suits and ties meandered past each other; women walked with hands outstretched, pushing non-existent prams. All were silent, grey and drifting – the colours of their clothes faded, their faces bleached as white as bone. ‘Lost souls’, the skull had called them, and I knew that it was right. They were lost, mindlessly repeating actions that no longer had a meaning.
From all these inhabitants of the dark city we turned away and fled, and were soon worn out from all our twists and turns and switches of direction. Even in our cloaks, the remorseless cold and tension ate away at our energies. Lockwood himself grew slower. George, already weak before stepping through the spirit-gate, was suffering. I took his arm, helped him along the road.
‘I don’t like the trail we’re leaving, Luce,’ he whispered after a time.
‘You mean our footprints?’ In places the ground was laced with the faint imprints of naked feet, crossing to and fro. Our heavy boot marks stood out amongst them, trodden deep into the frost.
‘Yeah, them – and the vapour trail,’ George said. And it was true. Our icy cloaks were flickering with silent silver flames as the unnatural cold attacked their surface; from this a thin grey smoke was rising, floating behind us as we walked. ‘Think they could sense that – smell it maybe?’
I nodded. ‘I think so.’
‘Well, we’ve got our weapons,’ Kipps said. Of all of us, he seemed to be bearing up the best. At each crossroads he was at the vanguard, going ahead, scouting the way. ‘I’ve still got a flare. And with these rapiers …’
I shook my head. My limbs were heavy, my breath rasped at the back of my throat. ‘I don’t know, Quill. The rules are different now. When Lockwood and I were here before, we tried a flare – it didn’t work. I don’t know that even a sword would hold them off for long. Take it from me, if they notice us, all we can do is run.’
We had progressed by now into an area that in our London was near to the great thoroughfare of Oxford Street. The buildings were larger; mist hung low between them like the waters of a white lagoon. Giant cracks ran across the fabric of the shop fronts and hotels; some fissures extended into the roads, causing slabs of frozen tarmac to sheer up like shark fins through the mist. Here there was more activity among the dead: they seemed to move faster, with greater purpose or agitation. Several times we had to duck into an abandoned doorway as grey figures drifted past. But if they noticed our footprints or our trailing smoke, they showed no sign: something else had a stronger pull.
What this was, we discovered further on. We came to an open square, a place where black and leafless trees stood on a patch of frosted ground, fringed by tall office buildings. Here, in the distance, a large number of the dead had congregated. They had their backs to us and the mist was thick around them, but we could see men and women and children dressed in a variety of styles. They weren’t still, but shuffling and moving around with every appearance of disquiet, and the focus of their attention was something that hung in front of them, dark but also shimmering.
Desperate as we were to keep moving – we were barely halfway to Fittes House, and our strength was already failing – we couldn’t help but stop and stare at what we saw.
If you asked me afterwards, I would have said it was a door, though it was unlike any door that I had ever seen. It hung in mid-air, floating a short way above the ground, right in the centre of that little square. It was a slab of blackness, without definite shape. Seen from one angle, it was almost oval; from another, as thin as paper. Either way, the edges sort of blurred and faded, as if they were spun out of the air. You could see nothing in the middle of the door but a kind of glimmering, like stars. Fearful as we were, we were transfixed by it. We stayed there, loitering at the edge of the square, entranced by the strangeness of the scene.
‘Is it a Source?’ Kipps whispered. ‘A way back to our world?’ He ran a tongue over frozen lips. ‘I feel it calling to me …’
‘It’s not a Source,’ Holly said. ‘It’s something else.’
Lockwood gave a sigh that was almost one of longing. ‘I think it’s a way of moving onwards. Look – they want to. But they can’t.’
Indeed, it was clear that the dead were making a great effort to get closer to the doorway in the air, but were kept at bay by something that had been erected all around it. This was an ugly-looking fence, silver and shiny and obviously man-made. It looked a bit like one of the silver nets we kept in our belts, only it was much bigger, and supported by poles. The net seemed largely formed of little barbs, on which white flecks hung twitching and fluttering. As we watched, one of the dead men in the square, impelled by an irresistible compulsion, broke free of the crowd and threw himself against the fence. There was a soft sound, a flash of light; the figure fell back, writhing. New white fronds hung twitching from the net and the crowd stirred in agitation.
‘Marissa’s work,’ George croaked. ‘We wondered how she got her plasm. Now we know.’
‘They’re trapped here,’ I said. ‘Poor things. They’re blocked and can’t get out …’