Haunted: A Lockwood & Co Story

Chapter Fourteen: Chelsea Containment Zone

The next evening, the three saw it for themselves.

DEPRAC had set up temporary headquarters in Sloane Square at the eastern margin of the containment zone. The square had been cordoned off from the public; giant warning posters hung from hoardings, and unsmiling officers stood at entry points. Lockwood, George and Charlotte showed their passes, and were waved through.

The surrounding streets had been silent, dark and empty, though Charlotte had seen broken windows, overturned cars and other scattered evidence of recent protests. The square, however, was bright and filled with feverish activity. Cantilevered spotlights on lorries had been drawn up in the centre, illuminating everything in stark and pitiless detail. The grass was bleached out, the faces of hurrying agents and officers seared white as bone. Black rubber cables coiled across the shining tarmac like monstrous veins, supplying power to temporary ghost-lamps on the roofs, and to outdoor heaters near the catering vans.

Everywhere Charlotte looked, people thronged. Bands of agents trotting after their supervisors, patting their belt-pouches, testing their swords; long-haired Sensitives, queuing drippy at the tea urns like rows of weeping willow trees; night-watch kids, be-scarfed and bobble-hatted, clustering as close to the heaters as they dare; suited adult DEPRAC workers rushing back and forth like they actually did something for a living beyond letting children enter a psychically ravaged area of London on their behalf. A hair salon on one corner had been commandeered; here representatives of Mullet & Sons, the rapier dealers, had created an outpost where swords could be replaced, repaired or just scraped free of ectoplasm, once each team returned from its nightly expedition into the haunted wastes of Chelsea.

At the western end of the square imposing iron barriers, ten feet high and fixed into concrete bases, had been dragged across to block the entrance to the street beyond. This street was the King's Road, which ran from Sloane Square for more than a mile south-west to the lavender factories of Fulham Broadway. In more ordinary times, it was the spine of a popular shopping district, with residential streets radiating from it like the barbs of a feather. The past six weeks had changed all that. Now a single gate in the barrier, locked and guarded, provided the only access, with a squat watchtower of scaffolding and wooden boards rising beside it.

As arranged with Barnes, they made straight for the tower.

The inspector's deputy, Officer Ernest Dobbs, met them at the foot of the gantry. He was a stolid young man, a typical DEPRAC officer from the tip of his cauliflower ears to the spit-and-polish predictability of his hobnail boots. He regarded the agency members sceptically, eyes lingering on the wad of gauze now taped to Lockwood's forehead above his left eye. Then he led them up the steps. At the top he stood aside and waved a negligent hand.

"Here you go," he said. "Welcome to Chelsea."

The ghost lamps of the King's Road were still on. They stretched away into the wintry dark, two string of flickering white orbs, carrying with them the dark fronts of the buildings on either side. Dark, but not entirely dark: at certain windows, faint spectral glows could be seen, dim blues and greens that pulsed and wavered, and here and there went suddenly out. Far off, at the junction with a side-street, a pale figure flitted away into the night. Charlotte heard snatched of screaming carried on the wind- fragments of noise that neither started nor stopped, but just repeated on a mindless loop.

A small group of agents clustered below a lamp not far from the barrier. Their supervisor, a woman, gave an order; they crossed into a house and were gone.

Near them, a shop window was smashed and gaping. Glass lay strewn across the pavement, mixed with iron and salt. On the opposite side a great black stain was smeared across a shop front and the pavement had been blistered by a magnesium blast. Leaves and twigs from recent storms lay on the road and on the cars parked at the kerbside. Twists of newspaper fluttered in doorways. Many of the buildings had ghost-marks daubed on the windows. The entrance to a ide-road was thickly strewn with iron.