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One misconception about being an agent is that every case is as dangerous as any other. And in full truth, to an outsider, yes, every case is as dangerous as the last. But when you’ve been on hundreds of cases, most of the smaller ones seem to run together. You forget the details, you forget about what you had learned about the now dead occupants.
I wish this case was one of them.
Dangerous wouldn’t be the right word to describe it. I hadn’t felt that secure in a haunted location in months. But I never could quite shake it from my mind, as it had seeped into empty crevices and grown there like plants in cracked pavement.
We had arrived at our case for that evening. A middle-aged gentleman owned the house, recently inherited from his late mother. The structure was not unlike 35 Portland Row. This house was less filled with knick-knacks, cold mugs of tea, and leftover wrappers, instead, it was orderly. Everything was in place.
And something mournful and heartbreaking hung in the air.
“Something off about this place,” Holly said quietly. She could feel it too.
The main hallway continued down to a big window. Late afternoon sunshine streamed through it and I noticed there was something on the curtains. As we all stepped further into the home, I walked to investigate. Dozens upon dozens of birds, frozen in flight, were embroidered into the cotton.
It wasn’t until later, when Holly and I had separated from the rest of the group to explore more that I had noticed the menagerie of never-living birds that littered the house.
A man had met us at our home one morning, shaky and unsure.
“My mother passed away two months ago,” he explained. “My father died years ago, and she lived in the house alone after that. Neither of them ever said anything unusual happened.”
Some clients always seemed to tell their life story, the words and memories spilling out like tea from a pot, the pourer forgetting to stop before the teacup overflowed, the liquid flowing all over the table, the lap of the soon-to-be drinker, and the floor.
“We were thinking of selling the house, or keeping it, we weren’t entirely sure just yet. I had moved my family a few years ago to Southampton. But we came up for a few days to see what we could do about the house.
“It was my daughter- about your age, I think, but nevermind- who noticed something was off. She was up late one night, unable to sleep, and went downstairs, when she saw a young boy at the end of the hallway. He did nothing, just stared at her, but she was frozen for a moment, and well, she said he looked familiar. Like she had seen him before.”
The man- Mr. Bradbury, that was his name -went to pick up his teacup, but his hands were too shaky. Lockwood kept his megawatt smile, bright as ever.
“Do you know of anyone who has passed in the house, sir?” Lockwood asked. Holly scribbled away at a notepad and I took a sandwich from our usual client tea tray.
“My parents had a son before me. I always thought I was the eldest, when I was a very young boy, but I saw pictures and I had questions, always. Never met him. He passed a year before my birthday. I don’t know who else the young boy would be.”
Mr. Bradbury, his wife, and their two children were staying at a family friend’s house while Lockwood and Co. dealt with the issue. Mr. Bradbury had greeted us that afternoon when the five of us- me, Lockwood, George, Holly, and Quill- had arrived.
One ghost might only need one agent to be dealt with. But there was a gut feeling we all had. More than just one or two agents might be required.
George had a few more questions about the house, and asked them the second Mr. Bradbury met us on the property.
“Do any other spirits haunt the house that you know of?” This was a question perhaps all of us were thinking. “Or is it just the one?”
“I’ve lived here for years. The only ghost I have ever seen, or rather, my daughter has seen, was the one she saw a few nights ago. My sister and I lived as children in this house for years, we saw nothing.”
The Problem wasn’t a problem back then, I thought. Or rather, it was simply coming into its glory days.
We did standard procedures and Mr. Bradbury thanked us, then was quickly on his way, like most clients, wanting to rush off before they could get any hint of what else could be residing in the building.
It didn’t bother us too much.
We split up and Holly and I investigated the second story of the home, while George and Quill investigated the first and Lockwood the very small basement. The second story was living space- a bathroom at one end and a drawing end at the other, and two bedrooms in between. We’d been informed that no one had lived in either of them for ages, only one was currently set up as a bedroom.
Holly opened the door and we stepped inside. It was a room meant for a small child. A bed, not unlike my own at 35 Portland Row, sat at one end. A dresser sat at the other, painted with small little flowers. The most noticeable thing about the room was the rocking horse that sat in the middle of the room, as if a child had left it out before their mother could tell them to put it away.
Something was odd about it.
“Watch me,” I said to Holly softly as she took readings in the room.
I set my stuff to the side and took a step closer to it, kneeling down next to it. I took a breath before reaching out a hand and touched the rocking horse.
Children’s laughter and bright August sunshine filled my mind. Feelings of childhood flooded through my mind. The small legs of a young boy were swung over the sides as he rocked back and forth, back and forth. The wood creaked.
In the distance, someone called his name. I couldn’t hear it clearly, I strained to know who it was.
My hand shot back from the rocking horse. It stood there, still, haunting.
“Lucy!” Holly rushed forward. “Are you alright?”
I took her extended hand and stood up. “Fine.”
My eyes darted towards the rocking horse again and I looked at it. I didn’t want to risk touching it again, and even then, I doubted I’d get anything else from it. I had enough information.
Holly looked unsure for a moment, but she fished in the pockets for her jacket for chocolate and handed it to me. I thanked her.
“This was the room that was always locked, right?” she asked me as she took one more reading of the temperature.
I nodded, taking a bite of the chocolate. “He said that they opened it up occasionally when he was young. But no one really wanted to go in on their own.”
Holly took down notes about the room and we left it and the sad memories it possibly contained to rest. Though, at night, the secrets would certainly be further in display for those of us who had the ability to understand them.
We continued further on that floor of the building. Paintings lined the walls like toy soldiers in position. All of them featured the same subject, birds. Robins and crows, magpies and goldfinches. Some were flying high against a bright blue sky, others sat on branches or with their eggs in a nest.
“There were birds on the curtains downstairs too,” I said quietly.
“They’re everywhere,” Holly replied. “More noticeably up here, but I saw them on the curtains downstairs and there’s a few small statues on some of the tables.”
“Collecting bird trinkets? Sort of a strange hobby.”
“Mm, perhaps,” Holly said. She went to the other door to open it. It was a storage room of sorts. Old chairs and picture frames sat in a clustered heap. Knick-knacks littered the place.
“Reckon the Source could be in there?”
“Possibly. The house is gigantic. Really could be anywhere.”
We headed downstairs and a heaviness sat in my heart. Possibly malaise or what I had felt when I had touched the rocking horse in the little boy’s room- in all honesty, I was unsure.
Chill had officially begun to set into the house when we all met up. Everyone reported their findings, temperature dropping as the evening had continued, though the drop had been much more significant for Holly and I on the second floor than the others.
Lockwood pulled me aside as the others regrouped.
“What did you find?” he asked.
“There was an old rocking horse,” I told him. “In the room Mr. Bradbury said he wasn’t allowed in as a child. I saw a lot.”
Lockwood raised a brow. He took my hand. “What did you feel?”
“Happy, but at the same time, there was this… premonition. A premonition that something would be going wrong very soon.”
Lockwood nodded. We sat in silence.
“A woman was calling for him.”
“Bradbury mentioned to us that his mother grieved a lot over the years. A hard separation- mother and son,” Lockwood said, a note of distance in his voice. I gripped his hand tighter, remembering what he had told me as we had gone through old family photos redoing Jessica’s room so long ago.
“He died before Mr. Bradbury was born. Don’t you think it’s strange that his ghost never came back? I know he passed on before the Problem… But, a child, dead before their time…”
My mind instantly thought of Jessica and I was so familiar with his facial expressions well enough that I knew Lockwood did too. We were silent for a moment and I waited to see if he would say something, but if Lockwood wanted to speak about his sister, he didn’t give any further indication.
“There’s a death glow on the first floor. Not too bright, but it’s clearly there. After I investigated the basement, I joined Quill and George,” Lockwood explained.
“Where is it?” I asked, racking my brain for what Mr. Bradbury had told us. He had mentioned nothing of how exactly his older brother had passed.
“It’s in the chimney.”
“In the chimney?”
“At the foot of the fireplace, where you would put the logs. The fireplace is empty, it hasn’t been used in years, but George noted it looked different from the style of the rest of the house.”
I raised a brow. “Has it been redone?”
He nodded. “It gets worse.” Lockwood raised a hand to his temple, rubbing away some of the stress.
“He found some newspaper reports during his research. There were structural issues in the chimney and it collapsed on top of an unnamed boy. All we know is that it happened on this street.”
Oh. It... all made sense. My heart ached, thinking of the premonition I had previously felt when I had touched the rocking chair. There was great happiness in the young boy’s life, before… before everything seemed to go wrong.
“Chimney was on the bottom floor,” Lockwood continued, wanting to leave the most painful part of the conversation behind, “but Mr. Bradbury’s daughter said he had clearly seen the ghost on the second floor.”
“Source is likely on the second,” Lockwood said softly.
There was a heaviness in the air, that some cases always seemed to have. If we could find the Source and put the young boy to rest for good, then we’d all feel better.
I took his hand in my own and he smiled at me.
George walked over to us.
“Best to set up iron circles?”
Lockwood nodded. “Let’s get to it.”
Lockwood and I set up a large iron circle on the first floor.
“Are you alright?” I asked, slipping my gloved fingers in between his.
“Mm, yes,” he said after a moment, squeezing my hand gently. "Well, no. A bit worried."
“What about?” I said softly.
“The whole case, really.” He looked around. “I do hope that the Source is somewhere near. You know, sometimes I just prefer cases where we know how many ghosts there'll be and things are fine and dandy.”
"Our last few cases haven't exactly gone to plan, have they?"
"Not in the slightest, Luce."
We sat in silence for a bit longer, pressed up against each other, both protecting ourselves from the world outside the iron circle, but also just wanting each other close. We’d had multiple cases the past couple of nights and it was beginning to affect all of us- Lockwood and I both seemed to be on the edge of dozing.
And it was then I heard it.
Quiet, distant sobs, the most heart wrenching they could be.
“Do you hear that?”
It was a stupid question, considering Lockwood was deaf as deaf could be when it came to ghosts. But sometimes I just had to make sure, make sure that it wasn’t something of this world. Strange, perhaps, to want to make sure you’re hearing something that shouldn’t truly be there. To hear someone long gone.
Lockwood shook his head and looked at me in the dark of the sitting room. “I don’t hear anything.”
I was silent for a moment. I could hear the weeping again, the tiniest bit louder.
“Crying,” I said softly.
“A young boy?” Lockwood asked.
I listened more keenly. It was still faint, but…
“No. No, it’s a woman.”
Lockwood gave a sigh. “Nothing can be simple, can it?”
I gave him a smile. “Nothing.”
“I knew there wouldn’t be just one ghost.”
“Did you, now? Why didn’t you say something?” Though, we all had suspected there might be more than one ghost residing in the house.
“Didn’t want to put it out in the universe. If I said it out loud, it was sure to come true.”
“Well, it’s true already, Lockwood.”
I looked around the first floor. Something caught my eye, I wondered how I hadn’t seen it before, when I had noticed the birds on the curtains. A small glass statue of a bird, white and green and clear, sat on a table, next to a photo of two small children, whom I assumed from their style of outfit and the photo quality that they were Mr. Bradbury’s children many years ago.
Something told me to go closer, like the rocking horse had called out to me.
I gave Lockwood a quick glance and he nodded. I stepped out of the iron circle and closer to the statue.
It was perched like a bird on the verge of spreading its wings and taking flight, but currently protecting the newborn chicks in the nest. I took off one glove and tentatively held out my hand, my fingers grazing the top of the glass.
Heartbreak, like a premonition coming true. I was in the place of someone who had stood right where I was. Sadness, like what I had felt earlier, flooded my sense, but it felt like it would never be fixed. It was overwhelming, like being drowned in a river. I tried to regain my balance, find a branch to grab onto, to pull myself out of this feeling.
I was pulled up out of it by Lockwood.
“Lucy!”
Our eyes met.
“Lucy, are you alright?”
I nodded. Two adventures in the realm of Touch that intense were a bit too much for one case. He drew me into his arms and we stayed there for a moment.
“It… it wasn’t like the rocking horse,” I said after a little while. My mind drifted.
“There’s certainly more than one ghost in this house then.”
After an hour, we all switched yet again. The hallway on the second floor and its surrounding rooms were cold, much colder than before. Quill found another cold spot at the bottom of the steps, close to where Lockwood and I had been earlier.
Holly and I were partnered again and we sat together in the iron circle. The more we had spent time together the past few months, the closer we had even gotten. The Lucy of a couple years ago likely would have thought the possibility of friendship outlandish, now, I was ever so grateful for her company.
“Are you alright?” Holly asked softly.
“I will be, eventually.”
After some period of time, a woman materialized at the end of the hallway, like drops of rainwater accumulating slowly at the bottom of a weather drain.
I was hearing things correctly. And the feelings I had received from touching the bird statue in the entrance hallway were correct.
She was an elderly woman, her face weepy.
“She looks like Mr. Bradbury,” Holly said quietly. “Same nose, same eyes.” I couldn’t see her that clearly, but I took his word for it.
I could hear her weeping still and I remembered the sadness I felt when I had touched the glass statue downstairs. This was undoubtedly the person whose emotions I had felt. The heartbreak of finding her child and having them be taken away, gone forever.
Her pale spectre flowed along as she wept.
I turned to Holly. “I wonder if the boys have seen the other ghost.”
“I wonder too.”
Holly’s eyes were fixed on the ghost.
“Luce?” someone called up the stairs. From where we were, we could partially see down onto the floor of the first story. Lockwood looked up at me.
“Found a ghost yet?”
“We have.”
“Which one?”
“An older woman. I presume Mr. Bradbury’s mother.” Lockwood nodded and turned to George and Quill and spoke a few words to them. I turned to Holly and nodded and we set our minds on the ghost that was before us.
She continued to weep and my heart ached for her. How many years had she spent grieving over her son, her son gone too soon, who would never be seen again in this world.
Or at least, everyone assumed. Before Fittes. Before the Problem. Before everyone’s loved ones stalked the night.
For a moment I felt anger, not a foreign feeling, but a feeling foreign for who it was placed towards. I thought of Marissa Fittes, a woman I had tried to push out of my mind for months, her voice and eyes piercing even in memory.
Just how many lives did she ruin? How many spirits were brought back into a grieving, mournful state, away from the rest they deserved? If I was left for too long, I was sure my rage would bubble over like a pot left on a stove.
I pushed my feelings away and instead dealt with the matter at hand.
The ghost continued to weep as she trailed slowly down the hallway. I saw Holly shivering out of the corner of my eye. She had taken out her rapier; she adjusted her grip on it.
She stopped moving about halfway down. Her tears stopped. She didn’t even seem to notice we were there.
“I want to help you,” I said, the words falling out. Holly looked at me but she said nothing. She trusted me.
The woman’s tears flowed again. She did not respond, but kept walking, her spectral form flowing along until she slipped through the door of her late son’s room.
Holly and I looked towards each other.
“Reckon the Source is in there?”
“I bet.”
I took a step out of the iron circle and Holly followed. We were about to walk towards the room when we heard a yelp from downstairs. The two of us spun around.
A pale boy came up the stairs. He couldn’t have been more than four years old. He hurried towards a door- the door to his room. I could hear a voice, an echoic memory.
I need my toy.
His little feet ran along the wood floors silently, his form disappeared through the door just like his mother’s ghost had. Holly grabbed a salt bomb and we both adjusted our grips on our rapiers.
I was the first to act, it all being put into place like pieces in a children’s puzzle. I dashed into the room, Holly on my heels. The mother had vanished, the boy stood at the opposite side of the room. He made for the rocking horse.
The rocking horse… No… It couldn’t be the rocking horse. I looked around. The boy set his eyes on a small plush animal that sat on the dresser opposite the bed. It was a stuffed bird.
I took out a silver net and threw the plush animal into it. Both their ghosts vanished. There was a sense of calm, a relief from the psychic feelings that overwhelmed us all.
And deep down I felt something like a sense of peace. Or at least, I could convince myself it was that. At least for now.
No one spoke much as we cleaned up. The house was intact, nothing burned down. In many ways, it was a much simpler case than anyone could have ever expected. But at the same time, it didn’t seem to be all too simple.
Something deep down inside me still ached and I couldn’t quite figure out why. We had solved the case. My friends had all made it out alive.
As we were packing up our things, sweeping up the iron files and rolling up the iron chains, Holly came over and gently held out her arms. I went to them on instinct and we stood there for a moment, alone but together. She said nothing, but she understood.
When we finally let go, needing to finish cleaning everything up, Holly looked at me. “I get it.”
Mr. Bradbury came once the sun had been up, shining down on the house.
“The house is taken care of, sir,” Lockwood informed him as they met in the entryway of the home. “There was one more ghost that we all were unaware of.”
The older gentleman looked puzzled, racking his brain for who the other ghost could be. “Who?”
“All of us believe your mother.”
His eyes widened. “Imagine that.”
“No worries at all, sir. Plenty of unexpected ghosts in this line of work, practically in the job description.”
Mr. Bradbury asked us to tell him what the Source was.
“A stuffed animal,” George said, coming forward. “Of a bird, sir.”
The older gentleman nodded. “My mother loved to put birds around the house. Apparently, and she told me this when she was older, he loved that toy more than anything.”
All the birds that flew silently throughout the house rushed back into my mind. Memories of a boy long gone, remembrance of the son she loved so dearly.
“Seeing that it is all safe, I’ll be sure to go back into my older brother’s room. It’s been too long.”
Once we were back at 35 Portland Row, we all tried to nap, but sleep eluded me. I shut my blinds, tossed and turned in my little attic room, but too much was on my mind. I found myself downstairs with Lockwood while the others slept in.
“Tea?” he asked.
I simply nodded and he kissed me on the cheek before he stood up from the kitchen table.
We didn’t speak, I looked down at the thinking cloth. I could tell the events of the night weighed on him too.
My heart ached for the pair of ghosts we had encountered. I couldn’t seem to get them out of my mind. I had felt the separation between them, the consuming grief that had never gone away...
The moments slipped by and Lockwood placed a tea mug in front of me, made how I liked it. He slipped his hand into mine, our fingers interlocking. He kissed the back of my hand.
That afternoon, it rained over London. It was a lazy yet purposeful storm, the raindrops balanced in between torrential downpour and a gentle mist. It was almost as if the sky was weeping itself. Whether it was tears of grief or joy, I did not know. I supposed I never would.