The Hollow Boy

  Vernon coughed again, said something unintelligible.

  Holly stood up, put her bandages away. “Do you see that thing?”

  “No.”

  “Do you hear it?”

  “No! I’ll tell you if I do.” I shook my head. “God. Can’t you use your own senses for a change? What are you even doing here?”

  “Lockwood asked me to come, didn’t he? It’s not my fault my Talent’s not as sharp as yours.”

  “Well, you could always have said no to Lockwood.”

  “Like you do?” She gave her trilling laugh.

  “What?” I stared at her. “What does that mean?”

  “Like you ever do that.” She waved her hand as if it would magically dissolve the words she’d just said. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter. We should get going.”

  It was the little gesture that did it, the wave of the hand. All at once, the rage I’d been chewing on for so long was too big for my mouth; it was all I could do to spit it out. “Don’t talk to me about Lockwood in that airy-fairy way,” I said. “You know nothing about him. You know nothing about me. How about from now on you keep your patronizing comments to yourself?” The verbal onrush felt so good, I was giddy with it.

  Her eyes were hot and wet then. I didn’t care. It was good to see. “Oh, that’s rich,” she said. “That’s rich. You’ve been patronizing me ever since I arrived!”

  I blinked at her, genuinely taken aback. “Sorry? Me patronizing you?”

  “There you are. You’re doing it again!”

  “What? That’s not patronizing you. That’s just me doing a verbal backflip because you’ve said something so astronomically wrong and dumb. There’s a difference, you know, Miss Munro.”

  She gave a hoot of rage. “See? You can’t open your mouth without doing it! Patronize, patronize, patronize. What’s wrong with you? You’ve been hostile to me from the word go!”

  “Me? I’ve been a model of self-restraint!”

  “Oh, sure. All your snorting and tutting! All your eye-rolling whenever I tried to contribute.”

  “Guys, guys…” It was Bobby Vernon, clutching at us from below. “I’m only half-awake and probably a bit delirious, and was just in the middle of a dream about a goldfish, but even I know this isn’t a good idea.”

  “On the contrary.” This was the skull. “You’ve waited long enough for this, Lucy. Don’t forget the coat hanger garrote. It’s an option.”

  I listened to neither of them. I was too busy laughing in her face. “See, Holly?” I said. “This is a classic example of what you do! You stay all sweet and perfect, and twist things around magically so I’m the one to blame! You’re the one who patronizes me! I can’t blow my nose without you telling me I’m doing it wrong.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t dare do that!” she said. “What, and risk getting my head bitten off?”

  “I can’t stand the way you criticize everything,” I cried, “without actually saying so! You’re like a prim, uptight little schoolteacher, looking down on everything I do!”

  She stamped her foot. “Well, you—you’re like a…a stupid little dog, always yapping and growling. You made it plain from the first you didn’t want me there. Every time I said something, you’d start sneering and rolling your eyes, and spitting out the sarcasm. So many days I could hardly bear to come in. I almost quit a couple of times.”

  There it was again! This is what she was so good at doing. Twisting it, giving you the guilt. But it didn’t work this time. My discomfort fueled my fury. “Rubbish! I always tried to be friendly and welcoming, even when you started going into my room and doing those weird things with my clothes!”

  “It’s called folding!” Holly shouted. “You should try it sometime! You lived in a hellhole before I came! It was disgusting!”

  “I was happy with that hellhole! I was happy with the way it was!”

  Someone tugged my arm. “This isn’t good,” Bobby Vernon croaked. “Can’t you give each other girly smiles until we get out of this place?”

  I shoved his hand away. “Shut up, you.”

  “Yes,” Holly Munro snapped. “It’s your fault we’re still here.”

  “Hey, see? You agree about that,” Vernon said. “Come on. It’s not so hard….”

  “You think I’m just a dumb assistant! You can’t cope with the fact I saved your life!”

  “Oh, you’re wrong there, buddy. I can cope with that. What I can’t cope with is your endless sniping, your chipping away at me continuously while staring at me with that super—super silly—with that bloody thing you do with your eyebrows!”

  She gazed at me blankly. “Super silly?”

  Bobby Vernon lifted a hand. “Supercilious.”

  “Thanks.” I put on a stupid voice. “‘No, Lucy, not like that. Rotwell does it this way. Rotwell does it that way.’ If you like Rotwell so much, go back to that agency!”

  “I didn’t like working for Rotwell! He was disgusting. He’s violent and ambitious and he doesn’t treat his employees well. But don’t pretend you’re so caring, Lucy Carlyle! I told you about what happened to me at Cotton Street, and you couldn’t have cared less!”

  “That’s not true! How dare you say that?”

  “Then why didn’t you show it, Lucy?”

  “Because…because the same bloody thing happened to me! I lost my team as well! They all died too! All right? It upset me!”

  “Well, I didn’t know that!”

  “Well, I didn’t ask you to know about it, did I? It’s my business!”

  “Like Lockwood’s past is your business too?” She glared at me in triumph. “I know you went into that room. I heard you from downstairs.”

  “What?” I took a deep breath then, chest painful with rage. And as I did so, there was a small, drawn-out scraping sound from the checkout counter down the aisle. We all looked over: me, Holly, Bobby Vernon on the floor. At first we couldn’t see what had made the sound. Then we noticed that one of the tape dispensers, small, but heavy, made of shiny stone, was moving slowly along the surface of the counter. It went of its own volition, scratching, trembling, scraping across the glass.

  It reached the side of the cash register, bumped into it, once, twice, and then again, as if seeking a way past. Then, as we watched, it began to rise up the cash register, pressing hard against it, shuddering and screeching. When it got to the top, it flipped slowly onto its side, paused, and then, with sudden violence, shot along and over the edge, to fall back down onto the glass counter with a violent crack.

  We stood there, staring. Suddenly, in the silence, I could feel immense pressure stabbing at my ears. It was like a great wave suddenly hung over us, quivering, only momentarily frozen; we were in its shadow.

  “Oops.” That was the skull.

  “Now you’ve done it,” Bobby Vernon said.

  Holly Munro and I looked at one another. Just looked. We didn’t bother trying girly smiles or anything. It was too late for that.

  Too late for anything, but we gave it a go.

  No sooner had the tape dispenser hit the glass than Holly and I dived behind the nearest available shelter. It was a low display case, like a kind of open-topped table, stuffed with a hundred varieties of golf socks. Holly and I crouched there, bent close, our faces nearly touching. Bobby Vernon was crumpled between us, half-conscious, breathing heavily.

  It was very quiet in the room now. True, the psychic echo of our argument rebounded between the walls, on and on and on. Invisible lines of power thrummed in the room, taut as piano wire, heavy with built-up charge. But the only actual sound was a soft, rhythmic rustling. I peeped up from behind the case and looked over at the desk, at the counter with its jagged crack and the tape dispenser sticking up from the fractured glass like the bow of a sinking ship.

  A little stack of papers—brochures, maybe—lay on the glass. One corner of the stack was riffling in a nonexistent wind.

  The pages would ripple upward, then fall still, then ripple up again.
r />   I ducked back down.

  “Can you see anything?” Holly asked. The terror was plain in her eyes. Her voice shook with the effort of trying to rebuild her shattered emotional calm. I nodded.

  She stared at me. A twist of hair had fallen in front of her face; she was chewing the end, eyes wide in the half-dark. “So…so the Fittes Manual says the first thing we have to do is establish Type,” she said.

  I knew quite well what the Fittes Manual said. But damp fear had replaced the remains of anger in my belly. I just nodded again. “Yes.”

  “We know it’s kinetic,” she breathed. “It moves things around. But is there any kind of apparition?”

  I peeped up above the socks again. I could smell the lanolin in the wool, and the cleanness of the plastic packaging. The thought crossed my mind that Lockwood and George both needed socks, and that it would be Christmas soon; my next thought (less pleasantly) was that it was highly unlikely I’d survive the night to get to Christmas. I looked across the hall. It was now empty of all the dark shapes that had clustered there earlier. Either they’d been driven back, or absorbed into the mass of cold, pulsating energy that hung vibrating around us—energy our argument had summoned into being. I ducked my head down once more. “No.”

  “No apparition? Oh, so it’s a…so it might just be a…”

  “It’s a Poltergeist, Holly. Yes, it is.”

  She swallowed. “Okay….”

  I dropped Vernon’s leg and reached out to grip her arm. “But it’s not going to be like Cotton Street,” I whispered. “This time it’s going to be fine. You understand that? We’re going to get out of this, Holly. Come on. We can do it. We just need to get down two floors and across to the entrance. That’s not too far, is it? We do it quietly, and we do it carefully, and we don’t attract its attention.”

  Over on the distant desk, the papers rippled, on-off, on-off, their hum soft and rhythmic like the purring of a giant cat.

  “But Poltergeists…”

  “Poltergeists are blind, Holly. They respond to emotion, noise, and stress. So listen to me. We make for the back stairs—they’re the closest. We go down to the ground floor and we find the others. We do it all step by step, stage by stage, very quietly and very calmly, and we never, ever panic. If we keep everything nice and neutral, it’s likely it won’t even notice us again.”

  I gazed at her steadily in what I hoped was a calm, reassuring manner. On balance it was probably more a wild-eyed lunatic stare.

  “Good luck with that….” Bobby Vernon said.

  He was only half-conscious, but he knew. Poltergeists, you see…Here’s the thing: they’re bad. Hard to deal with, hard to pin down. Impossible to control. Where other Type Two Visitors always give you something to aim at, Poltergeists have no physical manifestation at all. No apparition, no substance, no shadow. This, for agents, is a major disadvantage. It doesn’t matter how faint a Phantasm, say, might be; once you’ve locked on to its shimmering translucent form, you can lay salt, strew iron, or lob flares to your heart’s content. A Raw-bones may make your bowels twist tight in abject terror, but at least you’re never in any doubt about where it is. That’s simply not the case with a Poltergeist. It’s everywhere and nowhere, and all around you, and more than any other ghost it feeds off every drop of emotion you give out. It feeds off it and uses it to move things. Just a small amount of rage or sadness can fuel its power.

  Just a small amount…

  Oh, God. What had we done?

  What had I done, more to the point? I felt sick; I closed my eyes.

  “Lucy?” Holly’s hand brushed my knee. She was giving me a wobbly grin. “It’ll be all right, you said? So…what do we do?”

  I felt a flush of gratitude to her. My answering grin was probably equally wonky, and watery as hell. I jerked my head along the aisle toward the back staircase at the far end of the floor. “We get up—very slowly….We retreat a few yards at a time, along toward those doors. We just walk, we don’t hurry. We keep our heart rates down.”

  “I can’t….It’s impossible.”

  “Holly, we just have to do our best.”

  Standing up was the hardest part. Standing up in plain view. Like I said, Poltergeists respond to sound and emotion, so technically it made no difference whether we were hiding behind a cabinet or wearing top hats and sequins and high-kicking like a pair of excited go-go dancers—provided we did it silently. But it didn’t feel that way. Just the thought of being suddenly exposed to the thing beside the counter made cramps race across my stomach on skittering spider legs. Still, we had no choice.

  Whispering to Bobby Vernon to be silent, we both grabbed appropriate parts of him and, on a mouthed count of three, stood up. We stared over at the desk, at the purring pile of papers. Up and down went the pages…up and down in the cold, cold air….So far, so good. The rhythm hadn’t altered. Still, the dark crackled with psychic charge: it seemed that the tiniest movements we made would send shockwaves across the hall.

  I nodded my head. Holly was nearest the staircase; that meant she would have to walk backward, arms looped under Vernon’s shoulders, with me gripping his legs, following behind. Vernon himself, eyes half open, seemed scarcely aware of what was going on. He worried me. I feared that he might suddenly call out and attract unwelcome attention.

  Holly shuffled backward; I shuffled after. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the papers on the desk fluttering, fluttering….

  Down along the aisle we went, between the hanging coats, pressing each foot down with tender, soundless care. Steadily we drew closer to the stairwell doors.

  “Say,” a voice said in my ear, “this is exciting. I almost think you might make it.”

  The skull! I rolled my eyes in dismay, biting the corner of my lip. Would his presence disturb the Poltergeist? I looked over at the desk, at the gently ruffling papers.

  “Unless Holly trips and drops little Bobby and his head knocks on the floor with a whopping great thud,” the ghost continued amiably, “like a tufty coconut cracking on a rock. I honestly think this might happen. Look at the way her little hands are slipping….”

  It was true. Holly had stopped, and altered her grip under Vernon’s armpits. Her face was as pale as I’d ever seen it. But we weren’t far from the doors.

  “I call this a nice refreshing change,” the skull said. “You can’t talk back! Or reach around to turn my tap off. Means I can tell you what I think of you, without you giving me any lip.”

  We shuffled on. I squinted frantically across the room.

  It was okay. On the desk, nothing had changed.

  “Don’t worry,” the skull said. “It’s not interested in me. We entities, by and large, keep ourselves to ourselves. It won’t pay any attention to what I do.”

  I breathed out with relief. And just then Holly nudged a coat with her elbow, making its hanger scrape gently on the rail.

  “That, on the other hand…”

  My eyes flipped around; I looked at the pile of papers.

  They were suddenly very still.

  Holly and I exchanged glances. We waited. I counted to thirty in my head, forcing my breathing to remain calm. The room was dark and silent. Nothing happened. The papers didn’t move.

  I expelled air very, very slowly. We tiptoed on.

  “Hey, maybe you’re okay now!” the skull said. “Maybe it’s gone.”

  An empty coat hanger on a rack on the other side of the room spun up and over in a whizzing 360-degree turn, then rocked back and forth with ever smaller movements until it was once again quite still.

  “It hasn’t, you know. I was just kidding.”

  We froze, watched the space. Again everything was still. I nodded to Holly. Grimly, grappling Vernon tighter, moving slightly faster, we inched along the aisle.

  Away across the room, a ting of metal. One of the lights in the ceiling swung softly in the darkness. Holly started to slow, but I shook my head and we redoubled our pace toward the stairs.

&
nbsp; We needed to hurry now. We needed to get out.

  “Don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s over there,” the skull said in my ear. “Or by the coats…”

  I gritted my teeth. I knew what it was going to say.

  “Truth is, it’s everywhere. It’s right on top of us. It coils around us like a snake. We’re all inside it. It has already swallowed us whole.”

  All at once a squealing screech of feedback came from the speakers in the ceiling, followed by a low-level, crackling hum. Holly and I both jumped. Behind Holly’s head a pair of blue pajamas on a rail jerked too, as if someone was in them, legs bending, arms jabbing outward in a brief, appalling spasm.

  Almost as fast as it had started, the energy went out of it. The pajamas hung limp, without animation.

  A moment later we slammed through the swinging doors into the pitch darkness of the back stairs.

  I dropped Vernon’s leg, flipped a penlight from my belt, and shoved it between my teeth. The light showed Holly, sagging against the wall, easing Vernon to the ground.

  “Oh, God…” she said. “Oh, God…”

  “We can’t stop here, Hol,” I hissed. “We’ve got to move. Pick him up! Come on!”

  “But, Lucy—”

  “Just do it!”

  Onward, stumbling, down the stairs, contained within our bobbing sphere of light. We weren’t trying for quiet anymore, and we weren’t attempting to suppress the fear that, choking, rose within us. Holly was sobbing as she went; Bobby Vernon’s head bounced side to side as we careered against the walls.

  We reached the turn. Behind us, the doors at the top burst open, smashing back against the wall. Their panels of glass shattered; fragments cascaded down the steps, rained past us into the dark. A squall of air buffeted against us as we collapsed onto the landing below.

  “In there!” I’d been planning to keep going down, all the way to the ground floor, but I didn’t want to be stuck in the stairwell now. I nodded toward the door leading back into the store. Holly shouldered her way through—we entered the silence and darkness of Kitchenware at the far end of the first floor.