The Empty Grave (Lockwood & Co. #5)(95)
There must have been at least twenty of them in the hall; they were all stocky and muscular, their shaven heads like small boulders on which rudimentary faces had been drawn. These were the thugs who’d killed Bunchurch, the ones who’d given George a beating. My teeth clenched; my hand stole close to my sword.
‘Looks like you’ve got odds on your side of about five to one,’ Lockwood said. ‘Are you sure you don’t need a few more?’
Sir Rupert laughed. ‘What a motley little company you are. Like a troupe of travelling players, tattered and battered and woebegone. Lockwood’s lost his famous coat, Holly Munro’s all covered in blood, and Cubbins here can barely stand. As for Carlyle cradling a hideous ghost in a jar, the least said about that the better. And who’s that you’ve got lurking under there? It’s not Quill Kipps? Oh dear. Not dead already, I hope?’
I felt Holly and George shift slightly at my side. Lockwood didn’t answer the question; he glanced around at the soaring roof, at the ghosts floating like pale fish in their prisons of glass. ‘You weren’t very impressed with the location for our fight last time, Sir Rupert,’ he said softly. ‘I hope the Hall of Pillars is a glamorous enough spot?’
Sir Rupert grinned. ‘I’ve certainly no complaints.’
‘Single combat again, then?’
‘The thing is,’ Sir Rupert Gale said, ‘I’d like to, but that bloodthirsty young harpy Miss Carlyle there snagged me badly the other night.’ He raised his injured wrist. ‘I don’t feel quite the ticket.’
‘I’m not on top form myself, either,’ Lockwood said. ‘All the same, I’d go easy on you.’
The gap-toothed grin widened. ‘That’s kind. Actually, I’m going to save us both the bother. Here’s what the papers are going to say tomorrow. You were caught breaking into Fittes House. My team tried to stop you, but you resisted. A fight broke out. Fatalities ensued.’ The smile vanished; he clicked his fingers at his men. ‘Go ahead and kill them.’
Raised swords shone in other-light; the men walked forward.
‘OK, Quill,’ Lockwood said.
The prone figure on the trolley lifted an arm; with a stiff swing Kipps flung the coat aside, revealing the rows of weapons pressed beside him. We had a fine selection of egg-shaped flares and electrical guns, black and sleek and dully gleaming. George took up a gun and flicked the safety catch. He sent out a zigzag blast of light that caught Sir Rupert Gale in the chest and sent him whirling through the air. Meanwhile the rest of us had each seized a flare. We turned, took aim and threw. We didn’t aim for the men themselves, but for the columns ranged behind them. Three flares exploded simultaneously. The results exceeded our expectations.
The silver-glass in the Relic Columns was famously thick, on account of the notorious nature of the Visitors within; yet the egg flares, which were designed to take out whole clusters of lesser ghosts, shattered them even so.
Great splinters of glass blew outwards; shards capsized like toppling ice floes. After the first blinding flashes of magnesium fire, white smoke plumed sideways in saucer-shaped eruption clouds; and through this chaos of falling glass and spreading smoke, the liberated ghosts came swooping.
There: the sinewy form of Long Hugh Hennratty, stalking on tiptoe on its severed ankle bones. There: the Gory Girl, blindly crawling in a bloody nightdress. And there: the dreaded Morden Poltergeist itself. It had escaped its broken teapot. It had no discernible form, but had lifted the fragments of its pillar and was whirling them about in an upturned cone of broken glass. It caught up the nearest of Sir Rupert’s men and sent him screaming towards the rafters. The Spectre of Long Hugh Hennratty advanced with a horrid sideways hopping motion, like a knight moving on a chessboard; it passed straight through the bodies of two adjacent men, stopping their hearts with its spectral cold, and would have jumped at me too, had a blast from George’s gun not made it leap away.
Lockwood had his head down; he was pushing Kipps’s trolley forwards with all his might, slaloming between the broken pillars, between the rushing ghosts and screaming men. ‘Make for the exit!’ he shouted. ‘Keep on going! Don’t get bottled in!’
We ran with him, trying to keep pace. Some of Sir Rupert’s men had panicked and were fleeing for their lives; others still pursued us. I slashed at one with my rapier; he jumped aside and was engulfed by Long Hugh Hennratty’s bony arms.
‘Ah yes,’ the skull’s voice said – I still had the jar beneath my arm – ‘a spot of proper carnage. This is what life is all about.’
I didn’t answer. My head was filled with the sound of people shouting; with the hoots and shrieking of the ghosts; the blasts and buffets of the bombs. Holly had broken another pillar. George, dancing like a mad thing, sent out burst after burst of electric charge.
‘My God,’ I gasped as I ran. ‘The noise …’
‘These spirits are a bit showy,’ the skull said. ‘All that hooting and cackling. Don’t see me doing that. I ask you, where’s the class?’
The Morden Poltergeist whirled past, tearing chandeliers from the ceiling. It collided head on with yet another pillar, cracking it like a breakfast egg. Now it blocked our path. Lockwood wrenched at the trolley; we swerved aside, continued on.
Out of the swirling shadows ahead of us, his face and body blackened, his hair spiked outwards like the rind of some exotic fruit, Sir Rupert Gale came staggering. He held his sword outstretched.