Haunted: A Lockwood & Co Story

Chapter Seventeen: Finding George (and Kipps)

Charlotte fixed the metal bar to barricade the door against Winkman. She turned around to look at the room. Pews were scattered across the floor, and the catafalque sat in the middle of the room. Charlotte walked slowly around the catafalque, her eyes scanning the room for the lever. She had remembered Bobby mention it, but she had no idea where it could be. She looked around the pews, but there was nothing.

"What was it Bobby said? That the minister lowers the coffin during the service?" Charlotte muttered to herself as she searched. She looked up and noticed a small stand with a microphone near the catafalque and close to the door to the catacombs. "Of course. The pulpit!"

She ran over to the pulpit and started to rummage through the items on the stand and, to her surprise, found the lever tucked away in the corner. She pulled the lever and the sound of machinery filled the room. Charlotte smiled, feeling a sense of accomplishment, as the catafalque started to lower. She had found the lever and was one step closer to finding George and Kipps.

Charlotte ran over to the catafalque and jumped onto it before it was too late. The catafalque moved rather slowly and with every inche it lowered the more nervous Charlotte became. What happened if she didn't make it in time? That George had succumbed to the Bone Glass? Charlotte pulled out her rapier in preparation as the catafalque finally reached the catacombs.

With a shaky breath, Charlotte jumped off the catafalque. She closed her eyes in order to hone her talent better. She stood in the dark and listened to the racing of her heart, and beyond that to the silence of the place.

But it was not silent, at least not to Charlotte's inner sense. From unknown distances came little sounds - soft rustlings and sighings, faint peals of laughter that ended in a sudden sob. She heard whispering too, in cut-off snatches and somewhere, most horribly, the stupid repetitive clicking of somebody's wet tongue.

None of it came from mortal throats.

Charlotte was in the realm of the dead.

The pyschic silence was also broken, more obviously, by a cheery whistling sound from the ghost-jar in Charlotte's rucksack. Occasionally it stopped, but only to start up a banal and tuneless hum.

"Will you shut up?" Charlotte said to the ghost. "I need to listen."

"Why? I'm happy. This is my kind of place."

"It's a place you'll stay forever, if you don't co-operate with me." Charlotte hissed at the jar. "I'll brick you up behind a wall.

The whistling abruptly stopped.

Always, when you're alone and vulnerable, emotions seek to undermine you. Charlotte's started to go haywire then. She thought of Lockwood, fighting for his life upstairs. She thought of George- and the haunted yearning expression on his face after glancing at the mirror five nights before. She thought about how easily everything Charlotte cared about could be destroyed. She thought of the emptiness of her workbelt.

Charlotte compressed those emotions. Boxed them in and stored them in a cubby-hole in the attic of her mind. There was plenty of time to open that box later. Right now Charlotte had to stay alert- and stay alive.

The ground was rough underfoot: She sensed brickwork, worn and uneven, loose stones and pebbles, and untold years of dust. On all sides, soft, dry coldness stretched away. Charlotte could still see nothing at all. Around the shaft of light coming from the catafalque, everything was so black she might have been in a narrow corridor or a massive void; there was no way of telling. It seemed inconceivable that anyone would deliberately come down here.

Then Charlotte caught the faintest whirring, the sound of buzzing flies.

The bone glass. It was somewhere close.