Chapter Text
A couple weeks after Celia and Donald’s funeral
“Ant, wait!” He’d ditched his bike unceremoniously on the grass and Jess had dutifully righted it after parking her own. He ran out ahead of her. The cool air off the lake whipped up the rocky outcroppings. Gusts rifled through his hair, wild and bracing.
The bikes were loaners from the kids next door. Uncle Hugh had walked him and Jess over for introductions, and the mum, a blandly sweet woman named Hettie, had looked them over with a hand to her heart before asking if there was anything she could do. What had felt like a never ending parade of strange adults had made the same offer over the course of the funeral and the wake, so he knew the correct answer was to say ‘thank you’ and politely decline as Jess and Uncle Hugh had done over and over again, but the little dance of pleasantries had begun to make less and less sense the more they did it. So instead he looked around and impulsively pointed out the pair of child-size bikes propped up against the shed. That had caused Uncle Hugh to backtrack, insisting he would drive them wherever they pleased while Hettie had babbled over him, surprised but earnest and wide eyed, repeatedly reassuring him it was no problem at least until they could get their own.
A few minutes later Hettie’s little girls, the owners of said bikes, were handing them over a bit begrudgingly while Hettie nodded approvingly from over their shoulders. Seeing the pity on her face and the way Jess sighed and turned her face away, he regretted it a moment, but then they were flying just the two of them down the little paved trail that cut through woods behind Uncle Hugh’s property, and something inside him started to unwind just a tic.
Now he’d made it to the edge of the water. On this side of the lake the land cut away into a short, smooth cliff face. On the drive in yesterday he’d seen a group of kids taking turns making cannonballs, seeing who could make the largest splash against the sheer stone before paddling over to the little marshy beach. Today it was a school day, and the lakefront was empty save for a few teenagers smoking in the bushes and a mallard ushering a row of ducklings through the cattails.
He’d intended to jump right in before Jess could catch him up and redirect them over to the sand below, but now he was here looking over the edge, the water felt much further than he had expected. Rippling waves lapped at the stone with a soft sucking, whooshing sound. Some sort of waterbird trilled somewhere off out of sight. He swallowed, stripped off his shirt, stepped forward so his toes were just inches from the edge.
And then Jess was next to him. She was breathing a bit hard, their beach bag trailing off her shoulder. She elbowed him. “Jesus, Ant, you’re getting too fast for me.”
He snorted, still staring a bit wistfully down at the water.
“Come on, the beach is that way.” Her hand settled on his shoulder.
“Mmm.” He didn’t move.
“You want to do the jump.”
He nodded, finally looked up at her. “You’re going to tell me no.”
She sighed.
“You know I can swim.”
“I know.” She looked down into the water, her face pinched in concentration as if she was doing some kind of obscure calculation. Then she looked up, squinting a bit against the sun and the wind. She breathed in a few times, eyes roaming off into the distance. The sharp, tight angle of her shoulders softened ever so slightly, as if the wind and the sun were buffeting away some of the stiffness that had taken up shop in her body these last weeks.
He smiled. “You want to do it too.”
She caught his eyes just for a second and then turned back away with a little choked sound that might have been a laugh. Then she dropped the beach bag, kicked off her shoes, stripped down to her swimsuit.
“Okay.” Now she looked down at him, and her eyes were overly bright. She smiled. “Okay, yeah, but let’s do it together then, yeah?” She slipped her hand into his, gripping tightly. He squeezed back.
They stood there for one breath, two, holding onto one another. And then they jumped.
——
At Winkman’s auction
He was falling. Lucy’s fingers were the only solid point amidst the rushing wind tearing at his clothes, whooshing past too fast to breathe.
She was screaming, of course. She hated heights. Yet, here they were, the black water of the Thames rushing towards them at nauseous speed, her palm pressed tightly into his. The lights of the city blurred into trails like the arms of a firework bursting upward. It was pretty in a way that shocked him, and for a split second he felt outside of himself, marvelling at the fact that the beauty and awe of it could even register amidst the fear and adrenaline of the fall.
He lost her hand somewhere before they hit the water. It’s a funny thing about air — most of the time it’s entirely inert and you could think it wholly insubstantial until there’s a whole bunch of it rushing at you at once. And then it could just throw you about like it’s nothing.
For another split second he was reaching for her, tumbling, disoriented, flailing futilely against the force of the wind, but then he remembered the water below and the imminent impact, and he was straightening himself out, pulling his arms in about his chest, holding on tight to himself, trying to minimise the crash.
——
Now there was nothing to hold onto. He scraped up his fingers scrabbling at the floorboards on the way down. It was no use finding any purchase. But, in some small mercy, he did manage to right himself so when he landed it was on his feet rather than his head. He might have come out of it alright even, if it weren’t for the dining room table.
It was a large round piece with a fussy pedestal centre all done up with floral details and dainty little claw feet on little brass rollers. When he landed half on the edge of it, the whole thing just tipped straight up and then spurted out from under him, careening away off kilter on two of the little wheels.
The momentum of it threw him backwards. One foot hit the floor, but he couldn’t get the leg under him and his knee gave out with the speed of it. He was tumbling backwards, his ankle twisted up in a bit of threadbare rotting rug, bits of debris from the broken floor raining down, filling the room with a choking cloud of dust.
He slammed into something hard and uneven. The back of his head smacked against a shelf, and the force of it slammed his jaw shut with a clack of teeth that seemed to reverberate through his skull. Then there were a few staticky seconds of clatter, where he lost track entirely, dazed and spinning. He didn’t even register the moment his body hit the ground.
Next he was aware, someone was yelling. Holly. Somewhere up above. It felt faint through the ringing in his ears. He looked but couldn’t see her. The air was thick with dust, and the room still blurred and spun. Craning his neck only made it worse. He winced and squeezed his eyes shut, trying for full breaths, willing his head to clear. When he opened his eyes again, Lucy’s face was right in front of his, glassy eyes staring and otherlight radiating off her swollen, blue tinged skin.
On instinct, he jerked back, but he only managed to bang the back of his already tender head. With the ghost above him and the wall behind, there was nowhere to go. He frantically cast around next to him, patted his pockets, looking for the source. It wasn’t there. It must have jerked free of the silver net somewhere in the fall.
Cursing, he twisted his body in the little free space he had to move, frantically scanning to see where it had fallen. There was a sharp crunching, grating noise as he moved—little shards of glass grinding between the soles of his shoes and the floorboards. They stuck in the palms of his hands and his elbows. When he looked further afield, the ground was littered with twinkling granules. They glittered as the otherlight flowed over them, throwing little dancing pin-pricks of reflected light over the walls and ceiling. It might have been pretty, like a disco, if it weren’t so threatening. As it was, the light and the motion were making him nauseous, and the locket was nowhere in sight.
He turned back to face the ghost, only to find her hovering mere inches from his nose. He could feel the cold coming off her in waves, the chilly air making him gasp. His skin felt dry and tight, like it might crack from the cold. He made a futile grasp for his rapier, but it was caught up under him, tangled in his coat, pinned by his weight. There was no space to manoeuvre, and his limbs felt impossibly heavy.
Part of him wanted to close his eyes. If he was going to die like this, he didn’t want to do it staring helplessly at this reminder of what he had lost and what he was inevitably bound to lose.
Lucy pressed infinitesimally closer. She looked like she’d taken the fall with him, blood seeping from a split on her swollen cheek and her hair littered with bits of splintered wood. He couldn’t help thinking of the question Lucy had asked the morning she announced her resignation. Could a ghost show the future?
At the time he’d quickly dismissed it not so much because he was certain of the answer but because he knew it was the kind of question that opened up an array of dangerous possibilities. Ghosts brought with them all sorts of miserable thoughts, visions of disaster, fear and despair. If you spent too much time trying to look for meaning there… well, it was certain there just was no good to come of it. Whether or not a visitor had access to answers outside the reach of human knowledge, they were certainly malignant, and at the end of the day that was the only pertinent detail.
Still, now, with Lucy’s glassy eyes boring into him and nowhere to run, the question just hung there and refused to be ignored.
He’d known well enough Lucy was never his to keep in the first place. Of course that is what he’d wanted—something deeper, something more permanent. If he’d had any delusions about his own heart, there was no point in turning away from the truth of it now. But wasn’t that just the crux of the issue. He could push the idea away, understand it was irrational, maybe narcissistic even, to think that other people’s lives were held in the balance of his own misery. But the plain, inescapable fact of it was this: bad things happened to the people he cared about most. They just did. And no amount of running or rationalisation could change the fact that a pattern was a pattern was a pattern.
After the Wintergarden case he’d dreamt about it. In the dream he was running. He was dashing up an endless flight of stairs, but the context of it was broken down in that strange way that often happens with dreams. He couldn’t seem to hold onto where he was or why—the walls kept shifting, a clutter or familiar frames and bric-a-brac sometimes falling away in place of a single, endless curling bannister. The only constants were the stairs and the certainty he had to make it up them in time.
And he just couldn’t do it. No matter how hard he pushed himself, despite his heart beating in his throat, it was like his limbs were moving through molasses. Each step seemed to take an eternity, the top of the stairs so distant he couldn’t really make it out.
Then, when his legs and his lungs had given out, it just presented itself to him, the staircase folding in to meet him where he’d fallen to his knees, panting. Jessica’s door laid itself in front of him, cold, other-worldly light lining the edges. It was unlatched, the door already cracked an inch, and even though he knew what he would find there, it felt somehow worse to turn his back. It took only the slightest nudge to set it swinging open with a little whining creak.
He had just enough time to catch the fan of her hair, soft and brown spread across the pillow, the quilt bunched beneath a boot where she’d kicked out in struggle or pain, the solid line of her shoulders curled inwards. Lucy, not Jessica.
And then he was gasping awake, sweat beading on his forehead.
In the dream he hadn’t seen her face. Not fully—it had been shrouded by the sweep of her hair—but now there was nothing left to imagine, floating above him in excruciating detail.
He took a shuddering breath. Cold filled his lungs. And then there was a sharp crack. Bits of salt and iron pelted him in the face, shredding through the ghost from above, spitting and rippling the ectoplasm like sparks skittering through water. Holly was screaming his name, raining salt through the gaping hole in the ruined ceiling.
Lockwood gasped, sputtering, blinking salt from his eyes. Above him, the ghost flickered. It wasn’t enough to force a full retreat, but it convulsed, backed off a good foot or so, and that was enough. With a great effort, he rolled to the side, freeing his rapier. He slashed it up and through the ghost’s middle. There was no control or finesse to it, but it did the trick. The ectoplasm sputtered and snapped, popping out of existence.
In the same moment, there were a couple of loud thuds from the door and then the splinter of wood as the latch broke through the casing. George stumbled through, rapier in hand, eyes wild, curls standing out in disarray. His eyes flashed around the room, widening in horror as they landed on Lockwood.
Above them Holly was yelling again. “There! George—the locket, to your left! No—other left—there! Oh, ooh, for god’s sake! By that hunk of broken plaster with the rusty nails stuck out the end. Oh, but watch out for tetanus!”
“Seriously, Holly, least of my worries at the moment.” George growled in frustration. “Please, can’t you get more specific, the whole room is broken plaster and rusty nails!” He was spinning on the spot, frantically scanning the ground. Lockwood could see wisps of ectoplasm coalescing in the air between them—the fetch, moments from popping back into being.
Gritting his teeth, he wrenched himself upright. Black spots were creeping in on the edges of his vision, his head going light and fuzzy, but he pushed on. He took one laborious step and drove his rapier through the ghost’s middle. It hissed and spat, fizzling, writhing around the blade. On its far side, George finally dove to the ground, silver net flashing. And then it was gone. The pressure in the room lifted.
With it, went Lockwood’s will and adrenaline. He sagged, stumbling, reaching blindly for the ground as the room started to spin.
Then George’s face was right in front of his, his hand on his elbow, grasping surprisingly tight.
“Bloody fucking maniac,” he panted. “Shit. Lockwood—No, arsehole, not there, you’re gonna get glass—Here, just let me help you.” He steered Lockwood a couple stumbling steps to the side and back, holding on tight to his elbow and his shoulder, guiding him down to the floor. There was a tinkle of broken glass, shoes shuffling over the floorboards, and then they were both sitting, Lockwood leaned up against the wall. George was goggling at him, white faced, eyes wide. There was a smudge of blood smeared on his forehead, and Lockwood stared at it in confusion. He could have sworn it wasn’t there a moment ago.
“You’re bleeding?” he murmured indistinctly. Now that the danger had passed, he was struggling to hold onto any semblance of coherence.
“What?” George muttered. He was distracted. Inexplicably, he was fussing with the collar of Lockwood’s shirt. Lockwood could feel the pressure of his fingertips, one hand on his jaw, the other pressed to the opposite side of his neck. Hazily, he wondered if it was because he’d lost his tie. But that didn’t make sense. George didn’t give a shit about his ties. Then George pressed his hand down hard, and there was a sharp, aching, flash of pain. Reality clicked into place.
Of course it was his blood, not George’s. Now he could feel the heat, the sting, the wetness soaking all down the front of his shirt. It was mind boggling how he hadn’t noticed. Now he could see the abject panic on George’s face and caught its gravity.
He reached out, ostensibly for George’s elbow, but that suddenly felt impossibly far, so he gripped his knee instead. “George, it’s going to be alright, okay?” He smiled weakly. “That was a great bit of teamwork there, yeah? We’ll make it—“
“Don’t.” George cut him off. “Just don’t do that, alright? I can’t stand it right now.” There was a dangerous edge to his voice—emotions filled to the brim and ready to spill over the edge, vacillating somewhere between tears and venom.
“George—“ Lockwood tried again, reaching for placation, but George cut him off again.
“Lockwood, no. Don’t tell me what’s going to happen, and for god’s sake don’t try to tell me shit about teamwork. ” He shook his head, his mouth a thin tight line. “Look, I’m really angry, and I just can’t be angry with you right now. So please, just don’t, okay?” His voice broke a bit, tripping over the words. “Let’s just get through this and make it to the hospital. Then I can tell you you’re an absolute twat, and believe me I will, because you are. But please don’t make me say it before then. Agreed?”
There was a pause in which they could hear a loud creak and a squeak from Holly, presumably navigating her way back down the stairs, and then Lockwood simply murmured “Yeah.” He might have argued more, but he was too far gone to summon the words. He looked down somewhere in the vicinity of George’s chin because he couldn’t quite stomach meeting his eyes anymore.
Some time passed, and then Holly was there, and then paramedics, and then somewhere on the ride to the hospital, finally, he lost consciousness.