Chapter Text
“Lucy?” Lockwood stepped cautiously into the hall, brushing aside a mass of cobwebs. It was dark, it was only a glimpse, he hadn’t seen her face, and most pertinently, she shouldn’t have been there. Even so, her gait, the slope of her shoulders, the tilt of her head, it was all immediately recognizable.
So, she shouldn’t have been there; then again, Lockwood & Co had been contracted in by Fittes for the case, and there was a whole block of buildings to be cleared. It stood to reason Fittes had called in freelancers too. Clearly someone, somewhere had gotten their wires crossed and accidentally copied down the same address onto multiple requisition forms.
“Luce— Lucy, wait… Where are you going?” He’d caught sight of the heel of her boot, disappearing up the stairs. His footsteps quickened, and he raised his voice. “Come on, please, Luce, it’s me. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but we’re both here now. Are you seriously going to run away from me?”
He’d made it to the stairs now, and when he looked up, he found her stopped, standing at the top. She was lit from behind, weak light streaming in from a window somewhere up above. It sat silvery on the crown of her head and flashed across the bare edge of her rapier.
It had been a month since he’d left her sitting alone in a cafe cradling a cold cup of tea, a month since he’d climbed the attic stairs hoping to apologise and try again, and a month since he’d found an uncharacteristically neatly made bed and an empty wardrobe.
Lockwood could hear his heart beating in his ears. No matter that he’d been prowling a haunted house the better part of the last two hours, this was what had his adrenaline pumping.
He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t fantasised about this exact thing. Out on a job, browsing the aisles of Mullet’s, waiting in the observation deck at the furnaces, there was always a part of him looking out the corner of his eye, waiting to catch her gaze on him, looking for that trademark scowl, imagining it melting into a surprised smile.
In his imagination, she was always happy to see him, despite the abundant evidence that the real live Lucy had no interest. For god’s sake, she’d snuck out in the middle of the night without so much as a note or even forwarding address. Perhaps now he should just take it as a win that she was no longer running.
She was framed by the arched head of the staircase — an ornate Victorian affair, decorated with handsome scrollwork. Carved wooden leaves and flowers poured down above her head, cascading from the corners in bunching vines until they met the elegant, orderly lines of the frame. It was pretty, soft and ethereal, but also somehow solid and pristine, perfectly preserved within the general decrepit squalor of the house.
In contrast, the stairs themselves were pockmarked and warped. Cobwebs blanketed the edges, smoothing the corners into curves. Earlier that night during their initial walkthrough, Holly had probed a particularly hairy looking bit of one of the risers with the tip of her rapier only to have the wood give way in soft stringy bits, peeling away like wet cardboard. She’d wrinkled her nose as several little winged insects scurried from the pulpy wood and disappeared back into a crack.
“Termites,” George had observed with an apprehensive grimace. “Probably best to just avoid the second floor altogether if possible. You know, the sane thing to do would be to call in the Council building inspector to have the house condemned and then walk away with the deposit.”
Lockwood had frowned. “We should be focusing on the basement and the grounds anyway. Intel from Fittes is that the visitors appear to pre-date the house, so all we need to do is mark places to excavate.”
It crossed Lockwood’s mind to warn Lucy, but before he could form the words, she gave an annoyed jerk of the head, pointedly gesturing to shush him. Her attention was drawn to something off to her side. She glanced fleetingly back at him, and then she was gone from the frame of the arch, disappearing into the second floor.
He swore under his breath, and then he followed. How could he possibly not?
The stairs creaked horribly. On the third step his right foot sank a little when he put his weight on it, and he quickly pulled it back, hugging the wall to the left. It was a wonder Lucy had just run up them like it was nothing. But, also, clearly, she’d made it without issue. That had to be a good sign. So he forged on, sticking tightly against the wall, where he hoped the risers had more integrity.
At the top, he found her waiting, straddling the threshold of a room at the end of the hall. There was more light here, with a window between them, and now, miracle that it was, he could see her face. Her expression was laid bare, her eyes wide, lips parted, mirroring back to him some of the disbelief, apprehension, and hope that had been thrilling through him since the moment he’d caught that first fleeting glimpse of her silhouette through the kitchen door. It was comforting and disconcerting at once — both of them floundering, confused, but back on even footing. When she disappeared again through the doorway, he followed.
Towards the end of the hall Lockwood felt the tickle of hairs rising at the back of his neck. It was cold there, much colder than it had been at the base of the stairs, and a glowing layer of overlapping ghost trails carpeted the floor. He tightened his grip on his rapier and palmed a salt bomb. Fittes had been right that the basement was a major locus for the haunting — he and George and Holly had already identified a handful of spectres, all evidently pre-modern soldiers — but clearly there was something here on the upper floor too. Of course Lucy had zeroed in on it immediately.
A gust of wind blew through the hall, rustling his hair and stirring up little puffs of dust. With a shiver, he eyed the closed window on the landing. The apprehensive knot in his stomach pulled a notch tighter, but he stepped past the threshold anyway into the room at the end of the hall.
Lucy was standing at its centre. Above her a rusted chandelier trailed cobwebs like Spanish moss, wispy tendrils swirling gracefully in the eddies of ghostly wind. Lucy was facing the far corner, her rapier drawn, head cocked. She was clearly Listening, but she turned around when he said her name.
After a month of willing it, it felt unreal to have her so close. Anything he might have said got stuck in his throat as he just stared at her. She looked just the same. Really why shouldn’t she? It had only been a month. There were the heavy, practical, ectoplasm stained boots, planted sturdy and confident as ever, the caramel bob curling around the softness of her cheek, and her eyes, sharp and knowing and fixed on him.
She took a breath, the cold causing a little puff of steam to rise from her mouth like ghost fog. She still hadn’t said a word. He supposed she was still looking him over, just like he was with her.
She didn’t have her rucksack, and Lockwood was surprised to find it made him anxious to see her out without the skull. As much as he didn’t trust the foul thing, but he liked it even less to think that Lucy might dive into a case with no backup at all.
But then she smiled — a little, tentative, hopeful thing — and confused and worried as he was, Lockwood found himself grinning like an idiot. He said her name again, the word coming out in a puff of breath that felt like the first real exhale he’d had in a month. He took a step towards her, his hand outstretched, everything drowned out by the hope of it.
And that’s when the bottom fell out.
—
The wind was first. The unsettling, chilly breeze suddenly swelled into a furious gust, slamming Lockwood into the wall. The back of his head smacked into the plaster, and the air was punched out of his lungs. For a second he saw white, and he slid down the wall, blinking and dazed.
In the same moment his back hit the plaster, there was a loud, splintering crack, and in those first seconds of woozy confusion, he thought the force of his body had broken a stud. It didn’t take long to realise how devastatingly wrong he was.
Through bleary, doubled vision, he suddenly realised that Lucy was no longer standing at the centre of the room. In her place there was a jagged hole, splintered floorboards lining the edges like crooked teeth. His breath caught in his throat. There was a deafening ringing in his ears.
Then he was struggling, stumbling to his feet, head spinning. When he yelled her name it came out harsh and choked with no air to carry it. He coughed, breathing in the clouds of dust and shredded cobwebs stirred up by the gusting wind. Everything felt a bit unreal, strange and dream-like, seconds stretching and compressing.
He forced in a breath, made himself hold it and then do it again, because otherwise he would be no good for her.
His vision cleared.
Now he could see her hanging precariously. Through some miracle of skill and quick thinking, she’d managed to ram her rapier through a crack in the floorboards with enough force to make it stick. She had one hand clenched around the hilt, the other scrabbling to find a solid handhold amidst the broken wood. He could see her fingers, banded white and red from the pressure, starting to slip. She was looking up at him, eyes wide, face contorted in panic, the wind swallowing her voice.
“Hold on,” he yelled, and he surged forward, ready to throw himself on the floor to pull her up, but one step and the joists were sinking with a horrendous crack. If he put his full weight there, the floor would give out entirely, and they would both fall.
He leapt backwards into the relative stability of the threshold. Somewhere else in the house he could hear crashes and someone shouting. He took a breath. His mind was racing, flailing about desperately for a plan. His eyes flickered restlessly around the room searching for the manifestation at the centre of all the chaos. The room was empty save for him and Lucy. She was straining still, at the centre of the maelstrom, jaw clenched, hair whipping across her face obscuring her eyes,.
And then, with a sickening rush, a realisation washed over him.
It felt suddenly, terribly obvious — the way she’d run up the staircase like it was nothing, the way she’d stayed perpetually 10 feet ahead of him, the way she’d smiled at him… she’d been leading him here. And the ghost…it wasn’t manifesting because it already had. Lucy was…
“You’re a fetch,” he said, slowly taking another step back into the threshold. Of course another possibility had crossed his mind, but he refused to take even a second to entertain it. He raised his rapier. All the panicked adrenaline that had been coursing through his veins curdled into a lump of cold dread heavy in his stomach. The hope and anticipation he’d felt scant minutes before now seemed incredibly far away, naive and foolish.
At first very little happened. The wind howled still, rattling the ancient single-pane windows. The ghost thrashed theatrically for a moment longer. Then it gave up the act, and Lockwood watched in horrified fascination as it rose, floating slowly and smoothly out of the hole. The whiplash of it all had turned his head.
The ghost was still wearing Lucy’s face, still borrowing her expressions, and it fixed him with a look he knew well — a little quirk of the lips and a sharp annoyed arch of the eyebrow. Like it was het up he’d spoiled its game.
If this was the real Lucy, this look would have meant he was seconds away from a telling off, but not a bad one, just a bit of bluster. She would be scowling and snarking at him, and then he would maybe grin and laugh it off or snark right back at her. But the best part was he knew a few minutes later he would invariably catch her eyeing him out of the corner of her eyes, and, god, that was his favourite because sometimes she would have this little private smile on her lips like she couldn’t quite help herself.
He swallowed, gripping his rapier tighter. The ridges on the handle pressed deep into his palm.
There had been scant moments this last month when he wasn’t missing her. Despite his best efforts to squeeze out every opportunity for idle thought through an absolutely breakneck work schedule, the loss just permeated everything in a subtle but constant manner. It was like static on a poorly tuned channel — the kind of thing that just grated away in the background, wearing him down until suddenly he was snapping at a hapless DEPRAC accounting clerk over a minor paperwork mishap or slashing poor Floating Joe clean in half during rapier practice. Now, watching this little mockery of Lucy’s mannerisms, the static was swelling, getting stronger, drowning out the picture entirely. God, he longed for the steadiness of her presence by his side.
In front of him Lucy took a step forward, or, more accurately, she floated; he could now see that around her ankles her substance got thin and threadbare, trailing gossamer wisps of smoke, swirling gracefully like the cobwebs above her. She opened her mouth, said something to him, flashed a rueful smile. Of course he couldn’t hear her. He watched the shape of her lips, unsure whether or not he was grateful not to have that Talent.
“Look, what good is this doing you?” he asked warily. “You’ve been found out already.” He frowned as the fetch blinked slowly at him, causing Lucy’s eyelashes to catch the light and cast little curved shadows across her cheeks. “You wear her face well enough,” he continued softly. “I’m sure you’ve learned plenty enough about her and about me to know full well you’re barking up the wrong tree looking for curiosity or empathy.”
Undeterred, the fetch inched forward again, and now the look on her face was one he’d seen far less often but was nevertheless etched firmly in his memory. It was how she’d looked at him in the cafe that last day before she left — not cold or detached or angry, just sad and resigned. It was a strange expression, a kind of frustrated longing that had made him feel as if he was somehow a thousand miles away instead of sitting right in front of her. Like he was the one leaving.
It was that look, longing nipped off at the bud, that had stoked the queasy certainty that he was the reason she was leaving even if he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what he’d done.
At first that fact had made him hopeful — if it was his mistake driving her away, then it was in his power to fix it. But after three cups of tea and every bit of persuasion, charm, and honesty he could muster, she’d remained just as untouchable then as she was now.
He felt lightheaded. He heard yelling again somewhere off on the first floor and this time he could make out George calling his name. He should turn around, go find him and Holly before they tried to follow him up the broken staircase.
Now when Lucy stretched out her hand, he had the wherewithal to swing his rapier into a tight ward knot. She did stop, but she seemed entirely unperturbed. She even smiled in this frustrating, disorienting, knowing way. And then her features were shifting, her caramel bob replaced by long, sweeping black locks, devastatingly familiar eyes sparkling back at him.
For a long moment he just stared at her, his vision going a bit blurry. It had been six years since he’d seen her face save for photos, and now he couldn’t help himself drinking in every detail — little things he might have forgotten like the one heart shaped freckle high on her cheekbone or the way the fine baby hairs at her part stuck out a little funny, curling around a cow-lick. How strange to be suddenly reminded, to suddenly miss these things he didn’t even know he’d lost.
But even worse than that was the softness in her face, the apparent love, the little tender smile that had made him feel safe and cared for when his entire world had been flipped upside down.
For a second he was that little boy again, snuggled into her side, his head tucked up against her chest, breathing in the smell of her neck, the soft rise and fall of her breath steady and comforting.
And then, like every nightmare, every intrusive thought he’d had since that terrible day when he’d sprinted too late up the stairs to her bedroom, she was jerking back, her mouth stretching into a silent, pained scream, her body going stiff and blue and swollen. Purple veins threaded over her skin. Her eyes went glassy.
It was horrifying, but it was what snapped him back to reality, spurred him to action. In one quick move, he palmed a flare from his belt and tossed it straight into the fetch’s chest. Bright white flames licked across Jessica’s face, for a second illuminating her wide, glazed eyes, before her essence started breaking apart, writhing threads of ectoplasm falling away in clumps, shying away from the heat and the light.
Lockwood watched, stony-faced and determined. Everything had fallen away except for a cool-headed, purposeful anger, clear and bracing, like breathing a lungful of mid-winter air. “Really?” he snapped, cold and dismissive, tracking carefully the route of the retreating wisps of ectoplasm as they threaded their way into the bottom drawer of a tall, dust coated wardrobe at the opposite end of the room, “I don’t know what you expected, reminding me exactly what you’re capable of.”
Now, from somewhere below George was cursing, and he could make out Holly’s voice too, a shrill edge creeping in. Really he should find them, but he was buoyed on a wave of anger, and he only had a few minutes before the ghost would be back. Now he knew the location of the source, how could he not go after it?
He surveyed the space between him and the wardrobe. The flare had knocked loose even more of the flooring and now there was a massive gaping hole with the joists hanging loose from either side. There’d be no skirting around the edges. His gaze darted around the room, grasping for ideas before catching on the strings of cobwebs now hanging limply from the chandelier, and with that, he had a plan.
In a couple quick motions he had his tie undone. He gave the fabric a few sharp experimental tugs. It felt quite sturdy; he did always buy quality. Admittedly, he’d picked it out for the fine herringbone knit pattern, but most likely it would be strong enough to hold his weight.
He quickly knotted one end through the nail hole on his crow bar. The other end he tied into a quick loop for a handhold and weighted it with one of the spare carabiners he kept handy for closing chain circles. Then he whipped the whole thing up at the chandelier. The crowbar hit true, sticking sideways between two of the arms and the base while the looped end swung below. Lockwood laughed out loud, a little shocked and inordinately pleased with himself.
Now came the dodgy bit. He took a good few steps back to give himself a bit of a runup, and then launched himself across the broken floor, hand stretched out, grasping above his head.
For a stomach dropping, heart hammering second his fingers caught only empty air. But then they were closing around fabric. There was a sharp sting where the carabiner bit hard into his palm, but it didn’t matter because for a moment he was soaring in a glorious arc, his coat streaming out behind him, chilly air whipping through his hair. And then he let go.
He landed hard, the momentum sending him rolling, kicking up a great cloud of dust. His palm slammed into the floor with a painful smack that jarred up to his shoulder. There were some concerning creaks and groans from the floor, but it held below him and he skidded to a stop just inches in front of the bureau. He pushed himself to his feet, coughing, trying to expel the lungful of dust he’d swallowed in his landing. His hand was sticky, and now he saw there was a dark smear of blood dashed across the floor behind him, but he was far too elated to give it a second thought.
He could see ghost fog beginning to seep from the corners of the wardrobe drawer. Otherlight traced the outlines of the heavy dark wood, and the mottled, flickering beams of light were given form in the swirling dust. The dim glow illuminated a mottled array of water stains blooming across the wall, the edges scalloped brown wilted rose petals. There were footsteps in the hall. Holly or George must have made it up the stairs.
Lockwood quickly drew a silver net from his pack and knelt next to the glowing drawer. It stank of must and mildew, remnants of a life long gone and still decaying. The drawer handle glittered with little ice crystals, and when he pulled it out, the blood coating his fingers froze and stuck, but inside he found what he was looking for. A little gold locket lay at the top half swaddled in what appeared to be a mass of yellowed, moth-eaten underclothes. It had been engraved once with some sort of ornate, swirling floral pattern, but the lines of it were long worn over, smoothed into near oblivion by countless years of being touched and worn. Now ghostly fingers, blue and swollen, were beginning to sprout from the metal, strange and snake-like. Lockwood dropped his net, and they vanished into harmless fog, smothered immediately by the silver.
It was only then that Lockwood heard Holly calling his name, very near and present now. He got to his feet holding aloft the silver wrapped bundle and turned around to greet her with a triumphant grin. She was standing harried and wide-eyed in the doorway, but he only caught a fleeting glimpse of her.
First he heard the crack, sickeningly loud. Then there was a downwards jolt, shaking his feet out from under him and sending the tall, heavy wardrobe teetering forwards. He scrambled backwards out of its crushing path, but there was nothing there to hold him. It all crumbled beneath him.
And then he was falling.