Stroud, Jonathan - Lockwood & Company 03 - The Hollow Boy by Stroud Jonathan

Author:Stroud, Jonathan [Stroud, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Disney Book Group

Lockwood returned from his Chelsea excursion early the following morning, having spent the hours of darkness walking its streets silently and alone. He seemed both energized and baffled by the experience, which had served to back up what we’d seen from the viewing platform and heard from Inspector Barnes.

“The whole area’s awash with psychic activity,” he said. “Not just Visitors, though there are plenty of those. It’s the whole atmosphere of the place, like everything’s been disturbed. All the usual sensations we look for are there, drifting like invisible clouds along the streets. Chill, miasma, malaise, and creeping fear—you can feel them rolling at you down the alleys, or stealing out of the houses as you pass. They engulf you—it’s all you can do to draw your rapier. You stand in the road, heart pounding, wheeling around, waiting for the attack—and then they’re gone. I’m not surprised there have been so many casualties among the agents trying to make sense of this. It’s enough to drive anyone mad.”

He had seen a number of spirits at a distance—in upstairs windows, in gardens, and the backyards of shops. The streets were mostly clear, peppered instead with jumpy groups of agents, who seemed randomly dispersed. Halfway down the King’s Road he had helped steer an Atkins and Armstrong team out of a Gibbering Mist; later, a conversation with a Tendy supervisor leading four shivering operatives across a little park had led him to Sydney Street, the supposed center of the disturbance. It had seemed neither better nor worse than anywhere else.

“They’re digging up all the graveyards,” he said, “and sowing salt on the ground. Rotwell teams are bringing out equipment I’ve never seen before: guns firing salt-and-lavender sprays. It’s not doing a bit of good. Frankly, I don’t see us making a difference unless we come up with something new.”

“That’s up to me,” George said. “And I’ve got a theory. But I’m going to need some time.”

He was given it. From then on George undertook no new cases, but instead slipped seamlessly into research mode. Over the next few days we scarcely saw him. I glimpsed him once or twice slipping away from Portland Row at dawn, backpack bulging with papers, the documents he’d gotten from Kipps clamped under his arm. He haunted the Archives and the libraries of southwest London, returning only as night fell. He went back to speak to Flo Bones. In the evenings he sat alone in the kitchen, scribbling obscure notes on the margins of the Thinking Cloth. He said little about what he was doing, but he had that old spark back in his eye, glittering behind his glasses like a firefly buzzing in a jar. That showed me he was on to something.

While he labored, the rest of us drew back from Chelsea. Lockwood visited it once or twice more, but achieved little, and soon returned to ordinary cases. This was what I was doing too. We didn’t, however, work on anything together. With her usual cool efficiency, Holly Munro divided things equally between us, juggling our clients and our time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.