𝐇𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐧┃ Anthony Lockwood┃3┃

Chapter One - Since When Has Anything Good Happened In A Crypt?

Want to hear a ghost story? That's good. She knew a few.

How about the one of the sightless blue face pressed against the cellar window? Or the apparition of the blind man holding a cane made of children's bones? What about the evil swan that followed her home through the lonely, rain-washed park, or the giant disembodied mouth seen opening in the centre of a concrete floor? What of the milk jug that poured blood; or the empty bath from which choking gurgles sounded after dark? What of the orphan's spinning bed, or the skeleton in the chimney; or the vile spectral pig, all bristles and yellow tusks, glimpsed snuffling through the dirty glass of a shower-room door?

Take your pick. She had experienced them all. They represented a typical month's work for Lockwood & Co during that long and desperate summer. Most of them were written up in their casebook by George on the mornings after the events concerned, in between sips of scalding tea. He did this in his boxer shorts, incidentally, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the living room. It was a sight that was frankly more disturbing than all the hauntings combined.

Their Black Casebook had since been copied and filed away in the National Archives in the new Anthony Lockwood Gallery. The good news about that is you didn't have to negotiate the crushed crisps in the pages of the original if you wanted to know the details of each job. The bad news? Not every case was in there. There was one that was simply too terrible to be written down at all.

You knew how it ended. Everyone did. The city was already full of it on that last cruel morning, with the rubble of Fittes House still steaming around the bodies of the lost. But the beginning? No. That was not yet public knowledge. For the hidden story of murder, conspiracy, betrayal – yes, and ghosts – you need the account of one who survived it. For that, you have to come to her.

Her name was Nola Penelope James. She talked with the living and the dead, and it sometimes got to the point where she couldn't tell the difference any more.

There it was, then: the beginning of the end. There's Nola, two months ago. She was dressed in a black jacket, leather shorts and tights, with heavy-duty boots suitable for staving in coffin lids and scrambling out of graves. Her rapier was at her belt, a holster of flares and salt bombs was slung across her chest. There was a spectral handprint on her jacket. Her hair was once again cropped to her shoulders, though that didn't disguise where a few strands had recently turned white. Otherwise, she looked the same as ever. Kitted out for psychic investigation. Doing what she did.

In the outside world, the stars were out. The day's warmth was folded up and done. It was shortly after midnight – the time when spirits wandered and all sensible folk were tucked up safe in bed.

Nola? Not so much. She was shuffling around a mausoleum with her bottom in the air.

In her defence, it had to be said that she wasn't the only one doing this. Elsewhere in the small stone-clad chamber, her colleagues Lockwood, George and Holly were also on hands and knees. They had their heads low, their noses near the flagstones. They swept their candles close to walls and floors. Occasionally, they stopped to press fingertips into suspicious nooks and crannies. Otherwise, they worked in silence. They were looking for the entrance to a grave.

"Do you lot have to bend over like that?" A voice asked. "It's making my eyes water."

A thin, pale-haired young man was sitting above them on a granite block in the centre of the room. Like the rest of their raiding party, he was all in black – in his case, whopping big boots, skinny jeans and a roll-neck top. Unlike the rest of them, he had an enormous pair of bulbous goggles clamped across his face, giving him the look of a startled grasshopper. That was Quill Kipps. He was readying their tomb-cracking equipment, laying out crowbars and coils of rope on the surface of the stone. He was also keeping watch, blinking at the shadows. His goggles allowed him to spot ghosts, if any were around.