The Empty Grave (Lockwood & Co. #5)(93)

Kipps gave a hollow groan. ‘Not another of his plans! Please, just kill me now.’

Lockwood had also risen. He removed his silver cape, and stood ready with his hand on his sword hilt. He was smiling down at Quill, and suddenly a great happiness rose in me, a fierce confidence that everything would be well. Yes, we were injured and weary, and deep underground in the forbidden basement of Fittes House, with any number of dangers between us and escape. But we had walked through the Other Side together, and emerged alive. During that terrible journey my emotions had been suspended – there’d been no time or energy to think of them. Now, suddenly, everything was unleashed. I was full of love and gratitude to Lockwood and to all my friends – between us, we’d won through.

‘It’s pretty simple, Quill,’ Lockwood said easily. ‘We’re going to find our way out of this place and get you to a doctor. Much as I want to find that silver lift and confront Marissa, we can’t until that’s done. You’re our priority now. We’ll take you up to the ground floor and out the front. And if anyone tries to stop us’ – he tapped his rapier grimly – ‘we’ll remind them politely who we are. The main question is how we’re going to move you. You’re in a bad way.’

‘I can walk,’ Kipps grunted. ‘Set me on my feet, I’ll be all right.’

‘You can’t even sit up. Besides, you’ll just bleed over everything. We need transport.’

George scratched his nose. ‘We could pop him in one of those wheelie bins.’

‘I’m not going in a bin.’

‘What about that trolley?’ I said. ‘It’s got wheels too. We can get him upstairs in that.’

Lockwood grinned. ‘You might just have something there, Lucy.’

We helped Kipps to his feet. He was too weak to stand alone, and the wound was bleeding profusely. Lockwood took off his own coat and, with his rapier, cut off a long thin strip of fabric which he fixed around Kipps’s waist, holding the dressings tightly in position. Then we laid him on the trolley. It wasn’t a bad fit, though his legs stuck out the end.

‘This is so humiliating,’ Kipps groaned. ‘It’s like you’re serving me up as a dessert. Oo! Ah! Careful going over those bumps!’

We pushed him out through an arch in the far wall. The arch was identical to the one we’d entered by on the Other Side. Beyond – instead of the desolate cavern we’d walked through there – was a large, well-lit laboratory. Like the room with the gate, it was pristine, filled with lab tables, technicians’ chairs, centrifuges, scales, humming generators, and any amount of sinister experimental equipment I couldn’t put a name to. A great number of glass cylinders, the same as the ones we’d seen being carried on the Other Side, were arranged in plastic racks. Some were empty. In others, drifts of that bright and shining substance floated dreamily. The place had a chemical smell. Rows of strip lights lit everything and made my eyes hurt. Actually, everything in my body was hurting me right then, but I didn’t care. Inwardly, my heart was singing. We had survived the Other Side. We would be all right.

At the far end of the room were three lifts, one silver, the others bronze. Lockwood and Holly pushed Kipps’s trolley towards them while I made a detour across the room. The ghost-jar was sitting in precisely the location I’d expected, where the skull’s spirit had stood on the Other Side. Inside the glass, I caught the face doing something improbable with its tongue and nostrils. When it saw me shambling over, it flinched and waggled its eyebrows in simulated horror.

‘You look dreadful,’ it said. ‘Like something the cat dragged in. Comes to something when I’m the better looking of the duo.’

I picked up the jar. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Sorry for what? Your appearance? Your character? Wait – I bet it’s your smell. Twenty-four hours of terror, violence, chases and being to all intents and purposes dead plays havoc with the armpits. Don’t let Lockwood step downwind of you tonight, that’s all I’m saying.’

‘No. I’m sorry for abandoning you,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have left you at Portland Row.’

The face raised an eyebrow, and I caught a flash of the dark-eyed youth in the expression; then the plasm subsided back into its normal grotesque position. ‘Yeah, well, I’ve got to admit it’s worked out all right. You couldn’t have brought me here yourselves. Ooh, I see Kipps died, then. Pity.’

We had reached the others at the lifts. Lockwood and Holly were standing by the trolley, on which Kipps lolled irritably. George had stopped at a rack of large metallic objects and was inspecting them closely.

‘Kipps is actually still alive,’ I said. ‘See, he’s moving.’

‘Are you sure? That could be gas escaping. Corpses do that, you know.’

‘Is the ghost talking about me again?’ Kipps mumbled. ‘What’s it saying?’

‘Nothing important. What have you got there, George?’

It was unquestionably the case that Quill had functioned better than the rest of us on the Other Side. Perhaps because of his wound, perhaps because he truly was much closer to death than any of the rest of us, he had coped unusually well. By contrast, George had been nearly finished off by the night journey; but now his energies were fast returning. Bruised and battered as he was, he shared my elation at our return to the mortal world. There was now a glint behind his cracked spectacles that I hadn’t seen for some time. He indicated the rack behind him.