(eng) Jonathan Stroud - Lockwood & Co 04 by The Creeping Shadow

Author:The Creeping Shadow [Shadow, The Creeping]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Whatever the skull’s complaints, I didn’t think the chamber had ever been a ladies’ room. It was far too spacious. It was a simple tiled recess, once probably used for railway supplies, and now a storeroom of a different kind. In its center, a long trestle table had been erected; on that table, and in neat piles on the floor to either side, sat silver-glass boxes and jars of varying size, and each one of those containers was full. I glimpsed bones, lumps of ragged cloth, pieces of jewelry, the usual bric-a-brac that makes up supernatural Sources. But there were powerful ones among them; I could feel the psychic buzzing even through the glass.

Very powerful, some of them. There, in a silver-glass box halfway up one pile, I spied the Ealing Cannibal’s tooth collection.

And there, propped precariously at the end of the table, a certain familiar ghost-jar.

The ichor that surrounded the skull was thick and syrupy, but tiny pulses of green throbbed in its center, and the ghost’s voice echoed in my mind.

“At last! Am I glad to see you! Right, stab this guy quickly, and let’s be going.”

I didn’t answer. I needed to concentrate. I was not the only person in the room.

Behind the table, sitting on a plastic folding chair, was a man. A small man in a black suit with a dull blue tie. Those aspects I could instantly attest to. The rest was curiously vague; even as I looked at him, the details were slipping from my mind. He had nondescript brown hair, slicked back away from a bland, slightly shapeless face; he also had an expression of mild concentration; the tip of his tongue protruded from the side of his mouth. He had a cigarette in one hand, and with the other he was making notes on a piece of paper with a pen. But distinguishing features that would pick him out in a crowd? None.

Something about this overt and almost aggressive ordinariness made me assume that he was not the person I was looking for. He was a bookkeeper, an underling—certainly not the mysterious collector for whom the Winkmans toiled. But another part of my mind was jolted to sudden alertness. I felt as though I had seen him before.

Even as I made this connection, the skull’s voice came again. “Beware this man,” it said. “He doesn’t look like much, but he’s dangerous. Oh, great—I see you forgot your sword.”

The little man looked up and saw me standing in the doorway. “Who are you, please? You are not welcome here.”

It was a precise, finicky, almost waspish sort of voice, and now I knew I was right. It was familiar to me. A voice that dealt in figures and paperwork and bureaucratic details, as well as the qualities of the strange, unpleasant psychic relics on the tabletop before him. A voice that kept tabs on things, that reported on them to others…

“Who are you?” the man asked again.

I’d met him. Not so long ago.

“Fiddler, sir,” I said, giving a small salute.

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