Free Lockwood by Jonathan Stroud Page B

roughly cleared. Nearby rose a mound of dark, wet earth. A small mechanized backhoe, scuffed and yellow in the light of Saunders’s torch, blocked the path at an angle. Its bucket was still full. Spades, picks and other digging tools lay scattered all around.
    ‘They left in a hurry,’ Saunders said. His voice was tight and high. ‘Right, this is where I stop. If you want anything, just call.’ With undisguised haste, he drifted back into the dark and we were left alone.
    We loosened our rapiers. The night was silent; I was aware of the heavy beating of my heart. Lockwood took a pen-torch from his belt, and shone it into the black space to the left of the path. It was a square plot of open ground, bordered by normal graves and box-tombs. In its centre, a small discoloured slab of stone rose crookedly from the soil. The grass in front of this stone had been scooped away, leaving a broad, gently sloping pit torn in the earth. It was maybe eight feet across and three feet deep. The tooth-marks of the backhoe’s bucket showed as long grooves in the mud. But we had eyes only for the stone.
    We used our senses, quickly, quietly, before we did anything else.
    ‘No death-glows,’ Lockwood said softly. ‘That’s to be expected, because no one’s died here. Got anything?’
    ‘Nope,’ George said.
    ‘I have,’ I said. ‘A faint vibration.’
    ‘A noise? Voices?’
    It bothered me – I couldn’t make it out at all. ‘Just a . . . disturbance. There’s definitely
something
here.’
    ‘Keep your eyes and ears open,’ Lockwood said. ‘Right, first thing we do, we put a barrier right around. Then I’m checking out the stone. Don’t want to miss anything, like we did last night.’
    George set a lantern on one of the box-tombs, and by its light we took out our lengths of chain. We laid them out around the circumference of the pit. When this was finished, Lockwood stepped over the chains and walked towards the stone, hand ready on his sword. George and I waited, watching the shadows.
    Lockwood reached the stone; kneeling abruptly, he brushed the grass aside. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘It’s poor-quality material, badly weathered. Scarcely a quarter of the height of a standard headstone. Hasn’t been laid properly – it’s badly tilted. Someone did this
very
hurriedly . . .’
    He switched on the torch and ran the beam over the surface. Decades of lichen had crusted it, and built up deeply in the letters carved there. ‘
Edmund Bickerstaff . . .
’ Lockwood read. ‘And
this
isn’t proper mason’s work. It’s hardly even an inscription. It’s just been scratched by the first tool that came to hand. So we’ve got a rushed, illegal and very amateur burial, which has been here a long time.’
    He stood up. And as he did so, there was the gentlest of rustlings. From behind the grave a figure broke free of the darkness and lurched forwards into the lantern-light. George and I cried out; Lockwood leaped to the side, ripping his rapier clear. He twisted as he jumped, landing in the centre of the pit, facing towards the stone.
    ‘Sorry,’ Mr Albert Joplin said. ‘Did I startle anyone?’
    I cursed under my breath; George whistled. Lockwood only exhaled sharply. Mr Joplin stumbled round the edge of the pit. He moved with an awkward, stoop-shouldered gait that reminded me vaguely of a chimp’s; small showers of grey dandruff drifted about him as he rolled along. His spindly arms were clasped across his sheaf of papers, which he pressed protectively against his narrow chest as a mother shields a child.
    He pushed his glasses apologetically up his nose. ‘I’m sorry; I got lost coming from the East Gate. Have I missed anything?’
    George spoke – and at that moment I was enveloped by a wave of clawing cold. You know when you jump into a swimming pool, and find they haven’t heated it, and the freezing water hits your body? You feel a smack of pain – awful and all over. This was exactly like that. I let