Lockwood & Co.: The Creeping Shadow by Jonathan Stroud Read Free Book Online Page A

haven’t even straightened your bedspread.”
    “Yeah, well. It’s my dinnertime and I’m hungry.”
    “Yes—hungry, isolated, and friendless. Aside from me, of course.”
    “Thanks. I’ve loads of friends.”
    “’Course you have. I’ve seen bag ladies with more active social lives.”
    Suddenly I realized how very weary I was. I got up to put the tea kettle on.
    “Ooh, careful when you cross the room you don’t collide with any of your pals,”
the skull called.
“I can barely see the far wall, there are so many close chums lining up to chat with you….”
When I didn’t answer, it gave a chuckle.
“Lucy, I’m a malevolent skull, without an ounce of compassion. You’ve got to be worried if
I’m
feeling sorry for you.”
    I’d picked up the french fry packet and paper bag to put into the trash, but when I got there I found it was full, so I set them carefully on the floor. Then I took a detour back to the jar and twisted the lever on its lid closed, shutting off the continuing jibes from the ghost within. Even with the traffic blaring below my window, a sudden sense of peace enfolded me. I decided not to make tea after all, but go to sleep. I drew the curtains, lay back on the bed, and closed my eyes.
    I was still in the same position five hours later. Afternoon sunlight streamed past the ironworks and through a gap in the curtains and lay like a shining counterpane across the wasteland of my bed. I had a crick in my neck and an ache in my jaw, and my muscles were stiff with weariness. Consciousness was a struggle; moving was harder. I wouldn’t have woken in the first place except someone was knocking on my door.
    I shuffled the few necessary paces across the room. It was a puzzled sort of shuffling, since no one ever called on me. Clients didn’t come here; I spoke to them on the phone. So who could it be? There was the girl from the floor below who took my clothes on the weekends and delivered them back, washed and pressed, on Monday mornings. She was due today. But she always just left them outside the door, a neat little package of ironed skirts and underwear. She never knocked. It wouldn’t be her.
    There was my neighbor across the landing, a nervous gentleman of late middle age who wore iron ghost-wards in his hat and whose apartment stank of lavender. He seldom spoke to me, and jumped whenever I went by. I think he was unnerved by my profession.
    It wasn’t going to be him, either.
    There was my landlady, a ferocious matriarch who resided like a spider in the basement flat, sensitive to every creak of door and stair, particularly if you hadn’t paid your rent. But I’d shelled out three months in advance, and she never bothered me. So it was unlikely to be her.
    I didn’t know who it was. I went to the door, yawning, blinking, my hand busy scratching at an itchy spot down the back of my pajamas. I undid the lock and swung it open.
    Mid-yawn, mid-scratch, I opened that door.
    And it was Lockwood.
    Lockwood.
    It was Lockwood standing there.

L ockwood.
    After four months, his proximity was shocking; it was shocking, too, how familiar and unfamiliar he was all at the same time. He was standing on the dowdy little landing in his long dark coat, his right hand still hovering by the bell. His hair, as ever, flopped to one side over his brow; his eyes sparkled at me between the fronds. As I met his gaze, he smiled—and that smile was a world away from the hundred-gigawatt version you saw in the papers. It was warm but somehow hesitant, as if it hadn’t been used recently. It was the smile I’d hazily imagined a hundred times; only now it was real, solid, meant just for me. He wore the same old coat with the same old claw marks, from the night we opened Mrs. Barrett’s tomb. The suit was new, though, charcoal-gray with the thinnest purple stripe; as always, it was elegant, stylish, and slightly too tight for him. I even recognized the tie—it was one I’d given him a year ago, after the case