Lockwood & Co (4 page)

And with that we left the room behind us, and went to have a bun.

Shade

The most common variety of Type One ghost, a Shade is weak, faint and unresponsive to the living. It keeps to itself, endlessly replaying a single moment from long ago. Easy to subdue using salt and iron.

Cold Maiden

The traditional floaty female ghost, usually featuring long hair, longer dresses, and plenty of weeping and hand-wringing. Generally wracked by ancient grief or guilt, Cold Maidens are too self-absorbed to be much of a problem to agents.

Phantasm

A formidable Type Two spirit, ethereal, translucent and hungry for contact with the living. Phantasms are hard to spot – even for those with psychic Sight – and are best observed out of the corner of one’s eyes.

Spectre

The solid-seeming Spectre is the most common of Type Two ghost. At a casual glance, it may be hard to distinguish from a living person; closer analysis will reveal its old-fashioned clothes, unnaturally bright eyes, and undead pallor.

Wraith

Not the variety of ghost you’d want to meet on a dark night. Voracious, malevolent and cloaked in the shape either of a skeleton or a rotting corpse, a Wraith can overpower its victims through power of terror alone.

Dark Spectre

A mercifully rare Type Two apparition, revealed as an undulating cloud of blackness. Hangs in the air, swelling and shrinking, while sending out tendrils to snare the onlooker. Also leaves behind appalling ectoplasm stains on wallpaper and soft furnishings.

Poltergeist

This Type Two spirit produces no visible apparition, but moves material objects using telekinetic power. Weak Poltergeists ruffle curtains and knock books off tables; strong ones can wreak havoc across whole buildings.

Changer

Unlike most ghosts, which always maintain the same appearance, the Changer can alter its shape and behaviour. Animal guises are common, and far weirder shapes are not unknown. This unpredictability makes a Changer very hard to destroy.

Of the first few hauntings I investigated with Lockwood & Co. I intend to say little, in part to protect the identity of the victims, in part because of the gruesome nature of the incidents, but mainly because, in a variety of ingenious ways, we succeeded in cocking them all up. There, I’ve admitted it! Not a single one of those early cases ended as neatly as we’d have wished. Yes, the Mortlake Horror was driven out, but only as far as Richmond Park, where even now it stalks by night amongst the silent trees. Yes, both the Grey Spectre of Aldgate and the entity known as the Clattering Bones were destroyed, but not before several further (and, I now think, unnecessary) deaths. And as for the creeping shadow that haunted young Mrs Andrews, to the imperilment of her
sanity and her hemline, wherever she may continue to wander in this world, poor thing, there it follows too. So it was not exactly an unblemished record that we took with us, Lockwood and I, when we walked up the path to 62 Sheen Road on that misty autumn afternoon and briskly rang the bell.

We stood on the doorstep with our backs to the muffled traffic, and Lockwood’s gloved right hand clasped upon the bell-pull. Deep in the house, the echoes faded. I gazed at the door: at the small sun-blisters on the varnish and the scuffs on the letterbox; at the four diamond panes of frosted glass that showed nothing beyond except for darkness. The porch had a forlorn and unused air, its corners choked with the same sodden beech leaves that littered the path and lawn.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Remember our new rules. Don’t just blab out anything you see. Don’t speculate openly about who killed who, how, or when. And above all don’t impersonate the client. Please. It never goes down well.’

‘That’s an awful lot of don’ts, Lucy,’ Lockwood said.

‘Too right it is.’

‘You know I’ve got an excellent ear for accents. I copy people without thinking.’

‘Fine, copy them quietly
after
the event. Not loudly,
not
in front of them, and
particularly
not when they’re a six-foot-six Irish dockworker with a speech impediment, and we’re a good half-mile from the public road.’