The Creeping Shadow (Lockwood & Co. #4)

by Jonathan Stroud

‘Lucy, I’m a malevolent skull without an ounce of compassion. You’ve got to be worried if I’m feeling sorry for you.’

Mid-yawn, mid-scratch, I opened that door. And it was Lockwood. Lockwood. It was Lockwood standing there.

Lockwood. After four months, his proximity was shocking; shocking too how familiar and unfamiliar he was, all at the same time.

Making tea is a ritual that stops the world from falling in on you. Everything pauses while you do familiar things with taps and kettles: it allows you to get your breath back and become calm.

Lockwood set his tea down. For a moment he looked around the room. ‘I’m not sure this is really the place for you, Lucy.’ ‘Surely that’s my business.’ ‘Yes, yes, of course it is. And I’m not here to try to talk you out of it. I tried and failed at that months ago. You made your decision and I respect it.’ I cleared something in my throat. ‘It was the right thing to do.’ ‘Well, we’ve been down that road.’ Lockwood brushed his hair back from his eyes.

It was one of those moments when a single strand of time looped off from the rest, carrying me on it, and everything else seemed to freeze. I sat there, thinking back across that long hard winter to the awful day I’d left the company. To walking with Lockwood through the park as he tried to talk me out of it; to our final dreadful conversation in a café while three successive cups of tea grew cold; to how – growing angry with me at the last – he’d left me there. I recalled my last night in the house, with everyone so distant and polite; and my departure when all the others were asleep in the blue light of the dawn, dragging my duffel bag and the ghost-jar softly down the stairs.