Lockwood & Co Read Free Page A

closed my eyes, tried to empty out my mind.
    And all at once sensations came.
    I gasped. I took a sharp breath in. They weren’t nice sensations, and they filled me with a swirling tide of bitterness and fury. There was pain and dull resentment there, and envy too. But most of all there was
greed
– a hard, tight avarice that lusted after valuable things. Fleeting images came and went: I saw laughing children, school passages and classrooms (old-fashioned, but recognizably the same as the ones we now explored), and (dimly) soldiers struggling in a muddy field. But by far the strongest picture was that of an open box or chest filled with coins, and it brought with it a feeling of dark glee.
    I nearly took my hand away then, but suddenly, rising from the past, I saw a face I recognized – a beefy face with enormous side-whiskers. It gazed at me fiercely and seemed to speak. And now I was awash with fear and hate, and I was fleeing through the corridors, trying to get away, trying to reach my secret place . . . A door slammed . . . I was alone and safe! Safe for the moment! And, best of all, I still had my precious—
    ‘
Lucy!
’
    My eyes snapped open. The voice broke through my trance. I snatched my hand away from the knife and, turning, peered off through the open classroom door and down along the passage. I did so almost blindly. It’s always hard when you’ve used your Talent. Your head’s all woozy, and your senses don’t quite work. Like waking from a dream, it takes you a few moments to come round. Plus it was very dark.
    ‘
Lucy
 . . .’
    Halfway back towards the library, I saw a figure standing, tall and thin. It beckoned to me quickly.
    ‘Lockwood?’ I felt in my belt for my torch. ‘Is that you?’
    The shape beckoned once more; slipped out of sight towards one of the storerooms. By the time I’d stabbed my torch on, it was gone.
    ‘Lockwood?’ I called again.
    No answer. But I’d heard the urgency in the voice, seen the eager beckoning. I hurried out of the classroom and along the corridor. It was very cold out there.
    ‘
Lucy
 . . .’
    No mistake this time. The voice came from behind the door to the store cupboard. I reached out to turn the handle—
    A cough sounded right behind me.
    I whirled round, shone my torch up. Lockwood stood there – calm, unflustered, one eyebrow elegantly raised.
    ‘Luce. What are you doing? I thought I told you to stay in the classroom.’
    I blinked at him foolishly. ‘Er . . . yes, you did. But didn’t you just call me?’
    He looked at me.
    ‘Didn’t you just beckon me to come?’
    ‘I did neither. I’ve just been exploring further down the corridor like I said I was going to. As predicted, I found nothing. Because it’s
here
that the action is. As you’ve just proved. What did you see?’
    I shuddered, looked towards the cupboard door. ‘I don’t know. But whatever it was, it wanted me to join it in there.’
    Lockwood’s eyes narrowed. ‘Well, perhaps we can oblige it shortly. But only when we’re properly armed. Learn anything in the classroom?’
    I took a deep breath. It’s always difficult to express what you get through psychic sensations. It’s hard to put it into words. But this time I didn’t even have a chance to try, because at that moment a loud, shrill and unmistakably George-like scream resounded down the corridor from the library. It echoed off the walls and faded.
    Lockwood and I stared at each other, wide-eyed.
    ‘Oh, you know what George is like,’ Lockwood said. ‘He’s probably dropped an encyclopaedia on his toe.’
    Even so, he was already running.
    Well, it wasn’t a
single
encyclopaedia that was the problem, as we discovered when we burst into the library. To aid his reading George had evidently taken a lantern from his bag and set it burning inside the iron circle, and by its flickering light we saw a startling scene. Almost all the books that had been so neatly arranged around the shelves had been