Lockwood & Co. Book Three: The Hollow Boy by Jonathan Stroud

Author:Jonathan Stroud [Stroud, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Disney Book Group
Published: 2015-09-14T14:00:00+00:00

“I’m going in,” Lockwood said, when we were back out in the square a while later, holding passes with the ink still wet. “I want to walk around a bit, get a feel for the place. Don’t worry, I won’t engage with anything. What about you, George?”

George had his faraway look, the one that made him look like a constipated owl. “At the moment,” he said, “it would be a waste of time for me to go in there. I’d rather do a quick errand. Come with me, if you want, Luce. You could be useful.”

I hesitated, looked over at Lockwood. “Depends if Lockwood needs me.”

“Oh, no thanks. I’ll be all right.” His smile was automatic, unengaged. “You go with George. I’ll see you both back home.” A wave, a swish of the coat; he walked away toward the barrier. After a few steps he was lost behind agents, Sensitives, technicians.

I felt a jab in the center of my chest—pain, and anger, too. I spun on my heel, rubbed my hands together in a show of enthusiasm I didn’t altogether feel. “So where are we going, George? Some midnight library?”

“Not quite. I’ll show you.”

He led the way out of the square, south past DEPRAC cordons, down another street strewn with evidence of the protests: discarded placards, bottles, litter of many kinds.

“This is terrible,” I said, stepping among the debris. “People are going mad.”

George stepped over a broken AGENTS KEEP OUT sign. “Are they? I don’t know. They’re scared. They need to let their tension out. Never good to bottle things up—is it, Lucy?”

“I suppose.”

We crossed an empty street. Away to the right I could see another one of the iron barricades—we were following Chelsea’s perimeter toward the Thames.

“So you think Barnes is wrong somehow?” I said. “The center of the super-cluster’s not at the center? How does that work?”

“Well,” George said, “Barnes is making a lot of assumptions. He’s treating this like an ordinary haunting event, when it so plainly isn’t. At this scale, how can it be?”

I didn’t reply. It didn’t matter; after a moment George continued as if I had.

“Let’s think about it,” he said. “On the most basic level, what’s a Source? No one really knows, but let’s call it a weak point, where the barrier between this world and the next has grown thin. We saw that in Kensal Green, didn’t we, with the bone glass. That was a window, somehow. A ghost is tied to the Source. Trauma or violence or injustice of some kind stops a spirit from moving on, and, like a dog tethered to a post, it circles that object or place until someone severs the connection. Okay. So what’s a cluster? There are two kinds. One is when a single terrible event has created a whole lot of ghosts in one fell swoop. Blitz bombs did that, and plague, and there was that hotel in Hampton Wick that had been destroyed in a fire, remember? We found more than twenty crispy-fried Visitors in the abandoned wing.

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