It was a narrow passage, wooled with cobwebs, bending almost immediately to the left and out of sight. Darkness hung there, and also a faint tart tang, the smell of dust and death.
Somewhere inside was the Source of the haunting, the place or object to which the ghost was tied. Suppress that by covering it with silver or iron and you trapped the Visitor, too. Simple. I took my mirror in one hand, my flashlight and rapier in the other, and squeezed into the hole.
It wasn’t something I wanted to do, exactly. I could have waited for the others; I could have spent ten minutes cajoling them to follow me. But then I might have lost my nerve as well. Once in a while you have to be a little reckless; that’s a skill I learned somewhere.
The passage was so narrow I brushed against brick on either side, the cobwebs tearing off as I passed through. I went slowly, steeling myself for an ambush.
“Do you see her?” I whispered.
“No. She’s tricky; flicks in and out of this world. Makes her hard to pin down.”
“I wonder what the Source is, what she’s guarding.”
“Some bit of her, more than likely. Maybe the husband got overenthusiastic, hacked her into pieces. A toe rolled off, say, went under a chair, and got lost. Easily done.”
“Why do I ever listen to you? That’s so disgusting.”
“Hey, there’s nothing disgusting about random body parts,” the skull said. “I’m one myself. It’s an honest profession. Steady here—blind turn.”
Darkness bled around the corner. I took a salt-bomb from my belt and chucked it ahead of me, out of sight. I heard it burst, but there was no psychic impact—I hadn’t hit anything.
I raised my flashlight and peered around. “Maybe she wants us to find it,” I muttered. “That’s a possibility, isn’t it? It’s almost like she’s showing us where to look.”
“Maybe. Or luring you to a miserable death. I reckon that’s an option, too.”
Either way, we didn’t have far to go. The concentration of spiders—always a sign of Visitors—told me that. Ahead was a little room, choked with a thousand cobwebs; they were strung from wall to wall, fireplace to ceiling. Over and through each other they passed, forming a maze of soft gray hammocks and lumpy, dust-encrusted intersections. My flashlight beam was fractured, split, and inexplicably absorbed. I was inside a bird’s nest of maddening distortions. Tiny black-bellied bodies moved on the fringes, scuttling to find shelter from the light.
I hesitated, letting my eyes make sense of the confusion. The place was a former dressing room, I guessed, sealed behind the fake panel; remnants of tattered wallpaper backed this up. One wall had rows of empty shelves, another a small brick fireplace, with a skeleton of a bird lying amid the sooty rubble. There was no window. Black dust washed in dead, dry waves against the sides of my boots. The room had been shut up for a long time.
I listened; somewhere close I heard a woman weeping.
A tall, gold-rimmed dressing table mirror stood against one wall. Its pane of glass was smashed; dust caked the few remaining shards.
When I’d first looked around the corner, I’d sensed—just for an instant—a faint gray shape standing before the mirror, bent slightly, as if looking in. But the apparition, if such it was, had instantly vanished, and I was left to cut my way through the cobwebs with my rapier, scowling as they stuck to hand and blade. The mirror was cocooned like some giant fly.
In the story, Emma Marchment had been stabbed with glass from her mirror. The looking glass might be the Source. I opened one of the pouches at my belt, shook free its silver chain net, and draped it over the top of the mirror. I listened again. The weeping noise continued; the feeling of wrongness in the room remained.
“No…” I said. “Pity…” I was turning my gaze slowly around the room. The mirror…the fireplace…the empty shelves. The cobwebs were a nightmare; in places, visibility was down to nothing. I cursed the Rotwell group softly. “It’s so hard,” I muttered, “doing this on my own.”
“What?” A shrill voice of protest echoed from my backpack. “Who are you talking to, if you’re ‘on your own’? Let’s have some accuracy here.”
I rolled my eyes. “Sorry. Scratch that. Aside from an evil talking skull imprisoned in a dirty old jar and carried around out of a perverse sense of pity, I’m on my own. That makes a world of difference.”
“How can you say that? We’re pals, you and me.”
“We are so not pals. You’ve tried to get me killed dozens of times.”
“I’m dead, too, remember. Maybe I’m lonely. Ever think of that?”
“Well, keep a close watch now,” I ordered. “I don’t want her leaping out at me.”
“Yeah, a kiss from old jawless would be a bit messy,” the skull said. “Mind you, she’s not the worst we’ve come across. That must’ve been that Raw-bones in Dulwich. Remember its moaning? ‘I want my skin! I want my skin!’ Yeah, yeah, so you’ve lost it! Tough! Get over it!” The skull chuckled to itself, then stopped abruptly. “Oh, wait, hold on a second—you’re not trying that, are you? Lucy, Lucy…it never ends well.”
Which was only partly true. One of my Talents, along with Sight (fair) and Listening (better than anyone I’d worked with), was Touch—a variable and frustrating gift, which often gave me nothing (or too little), and sometimes far too much. In recent months, its accuracy had noticeably improved, and it was worth a try here. I stretched out my hand to the mirror and touched a fragment of remaining glass. Closing my mind to the present, I opened it to the past, inviting the object to loop me back to long ago.
As so often these days, the sounds came swiftly, and with them, dim images….The weeping noise faded, to be replaced by the pop and crackle of burning logs. I shut my eyes, saw the same room, but now it was filled with color and variety—as different from its modern incarnation as a living body is from bones. A fire flickered in the hearth; the shelves gleamed with jars and pots and leather-bound books. On a table, piles of herbs lay scattered, together with other, bloodier things.
A lady with long dark hair stood by the hearth, her dress stained red by firelight, the lace fringes of her sleeves rippling in the currents of warm air. She was doing something to the chimney, adjusting the position of a broad, thin stone. As my gaze alighted on her, she froze. Her head turned, and she glared across at me; it was a look of such malignant possessiveness that I recoiled. My shoulder bumped against the wall behind me, and I was back in the present, in the dark, cold empty shell of the little room.
“You took your sweet time,” the skull said.
I rubbed my eyes. To me it had been a fleeting instant. “How long was I gone?”
“I hankered for a newspaper and slippers, I was that bored. Find anything?”
“Maybe.” I flicked my flashlight beam onto the black hole of the fireplace. A little higher up, scarcely visible under its patina of dirt, was that broad, thin stone.
I still have it. That’s what the ghost of Emma Marchment had said.
Still in there. Her special thing.
I took my crowbar from my belt. In two steps I was at the stone, prying and scraping at its edge. It wasn’t the nicest thing in the world, turning my back on that cobwebby room, but there was no alternative. Years of black soot had filled the gaps around it, and the stone was hard to move. I wished I was stronger. I wished I was part of a proper team. Then I’d have had someone to stand behind me, guard my back, and watch the shadows. But I didn’t have that luxury.