The house was still silent when Anthony Lockwood made his way to the kitchen that morning, the only sound to be heard was the steady thrum of raindrops against the window panes. His agency had finished up a case involving a small cluster of Type Two Visitors in Westminster, and that meant that George probably wouldn't be up for another hour or two. Usually he'd sleep in himself too, but he'd woken up early and couldn't fall back asleep.
Anthony made himself some scrambled eggs and a piece of toast, and then sat down at the table. His eyes fell on one of the doodles on the thinking cloth – a caricature of George wearing Lady Esmeralda's hat that had been immensely funny at the time- and he felt a pang in his chest. Lucy Carlyle had made the drawing a few days before she had left Lockwood and co, and it was her last contribution to the once white table cloth.
It had been three months since Lucy left Lockwood and Co, and nothing had been the same since. While George and Anthony still took on cases and furthered their reputation as a supervisor-less agency, Lucy's absence weighed down on them. Bringing Holly Munro –their secretary turned spare agent- along if they needed an extra pair of hands or eyes was not the same.
With a sigh Anthony, put his plate down on the doodle, adjusting it so that all the lines were covered. He had tried everything he could think of to convince her to stay, had even considered firing Holly as the two didn't get along very well, but Lucy had held fast to her decision.
"This has nothing to do with her, Lockwood,"she had said when they had talked things over in a café right before she left. "I've endangered all of you more than once, and enough is enough. I can't bear the thought of losing any of you."
And that had been that.
She left a few days later, like a thief in the night, and Anthony was left wondering if she really thought that didn't mean losing them.
He ate and washed up on automatic pilot mode before making his way downstairs to the cellar, like he did most mornings these days. He knew he was worrying George with his behaviour - and Holly had started expressing concern as well lately-, but only exercise and the thrill of cases were able to draw his mind away from Lucy these days, so he took pretty much all cases presented to him, and spent the rest of his time down in the cellar.
He stretched for a few minutes to warm up his muscles, and then grabbed one of the spare rapiers to practice some fencing moves on Floating Joe and Lady Esmeralda.
The practice dummies swung with the force of his first few lunges, giving him the opportunity to work on dodging.
Fencing usually was an adequate distraction from his thoughts, but this morning Anthony found his mind wandering back to Lucy repeatedly, much to his chagrin. It didn't help that he could just see the desk she had been used just around the edge of the partition wall. The desk wasn't used anymore, but nobody had dared to clear it out yet.
With a grimace, he turned away and set to working on the warding knots he prided himself on. The complicated patterns required more attention than regular fencing moves, but still he found himself messing up more than once because he wasn't all there with his thoughts. His frustration continued to grow and grow.
When he caught himself looking at the desk a third time, he cursed under his breath and gave a violent lunge at Joe. The puppet swung back on its chain, and Anthony didn't move out of the way in time when its momentum made it come swinging back. The puppets were filled with straw, but the collision still threw him off his feet and the rapier clattered out of his hand as he fell.
"I think Joe won this round," George called from where he was sitting on the bottom of the stairs, and Anthony was startled. He hadn't heard George come down at all, but it seemed like he'd been there for a while.
The boy pushed his glasses further up his nose as he got up and walked forward to help his friend up.
"You need to take a break, Lockwood," he stated, his voice laced with concern.
"Why, I was just doing some training, got to stay in shape!" Anthony said, trying to sound cheerful and upbeat.
George was obviously not convinced.
"You're working yourself ragged. You've been down here for at least two hours," he replied.
Had it really been two hours already? Anthony tugged back his sleeve to take a look at his wristwatch. George turned out to be right.
"Let's go upstairs for a while, Lockwood. You need to relax."
And that was how Anthony found himself lying on the couch in the living room with a trashy gossip magazine he wasn't really interested in. It contained the same old rubbish about possible affairs between celebrities and Penelope Fittes' skin care routine, but didn't even mention new developments in relations between agencies.
It wouldn't have been as bad if the magazine had anything new in it, but it seemed like even the paparazzi didn't have their heads in the game these days.
He didn't know how long he'd spent staring at the same page of the gossip magazine, but at some point he'd dozed off, only to be abruptly awoken when Holly Munro threw open the door to the living room. He shot up from the couch ready to grab the closest object to defend himself, but George put a hand on his arm to stop him.
"Guys, there's something I think you need to see," Holly said. Her voice sounded strangely strangled. She closed the door to the library behind her, and walked up to Anthony and George in a few long strides. She looked shaky, as if she had just been face to face with a Visitor, and was clutching a large, spiral bound book to her chest.
Both boys recognized the book immediately -they had been the ones to give it to Lucy on her last birthday after all- but Anthony was the first one to speak.
"Holly is that one of Lucy's sketchbooks?"
Holly grew even more flustered, but nodded.
Lockwood and George stared at her in shock. There were a few unspoken rules in 35 Portland Row. Lockwood had the final word on which cases they accepted, the topic of Jessica was to be left alone, and nobody snooped in each other's personal belongs, ever. Lucy had left quite a few personal items behind when she left, but nobody had touched them before now. Holly used the attic room if she slept over after a particularly difficult case, but she had honoured the unspoken rule as well so far.
Lucy had always been very protective of her sketchbooks, and only showed them finished drawings if she was really proud of them, which didn't happen often.
George had tried to sneak a peek when she was working on a drawing when she had just joined the agency, and she had clutched the book to her chest and told him to sod off.
"I'm not going through your diaries either George!" she had exclaimed, and the drawing was forgotten as George tried to defend his research journals.
"Did you go through her stuff?" George asked incredulously, and Holly squirmed. She was unable to meet their eyes, and she quickly handed Lockwood the closed sketchbook.
"It's not like I was snooping!" she exclaimed defensively. "I was just getting dressed and I knocked it of the desk, is all! I didn't mean to look at it, but it was open and-" She cut herself off and crossed her arms protectively before her chest.
"Just look at it, it's important!"
Anthony shot her a sceptical look, but opened the sketchbook nonetheless. Lucy had filled up about half of the pages with sketches and drawings. On the first one she had drawn the view from the attic window, looking out over the street below. It was the only page she'd used coloured pencils for. The next few pages had been used for anatomy practice, and contained repeatedly drawn body parts in multiple positions with small comments on things that could be improved.
There was a half finished drawing of the skull in the jar a few pages farther, but she'd put a cross through it and added some commentary, which got a small chuckle out of him.
"Don't bother finishing, the stupid thing doesn't appreciate it anyway".
There were several portraits as well, of George and Anthony, some of particularly noteworthy clients such as the older gentleman with the two large moles underneath his left eye who had been haunted his father's ghost, and even Holly was featured on the pages once or twice.
With a frown Anthony leafed through the sketches. There didn't seem to be anything special or shocking about the drawings so far, and he didn't understand what had gotten Holly so upset. He finally reached the last used page.
At first glance, there wasn't much to the drawing. It was another portrait, like so many others in the sketchbook. This one was of him though, a beautifully detailed pencil drawing that faded around the edges. If he squinted, Anthony could make out some of the sketch lines that had been rubbed out and if it hadn't been for the rest of the image, it would've been like she just hadn't gotten around to finishing it yet.
Instead, Anthony's attention was immediately drawn to the middle of the drawing, where a gaping, bloody wound sat in the center of the chest. The shirt had been torn open and his favorite coat hung on either side of the figure, the color of it lightened in some places to give the suggestion of tears and holes in the fabric. Lucy had used a different way of shading for the face, which made it look pale and gaunt. The dark droplet shapes around the temples and the dull look in the eyes were enough to make Anthony's stomach do a violent backflip.
The fading around the edges wasn't because she hadn't gotten around to finishing the drawing at all. No, Lucy had drawn him as a ghost.
Anthony glanced down at the lower right corner of the page, where Lucy had noted the date and her signature in her other drawings.
There were no dates or signatures there, only four words that were hard to read because the paper was blotchy, as if something had spilled over it.
"This is your doing..."
He looked up from the sketchbook, wordlessly handing it to George who'd been trying to see it over his shoulder.
"When do you think she drew this?" he asked Holly. The girl wouldn't meet his eyes, and he idly wondered if his face was as pale as in the drawing.
"I don't know, " she said softly, voice trembling. "The one before it is dated two days before the incident at Aickmere's…"
"Geez!" George, who'd apparently found the drawing as well, exclaimed. "That's gruesome!"
"Why would she think of something like that, let alone draw it?" Holly asked, sounding distressed.
George closed the sketchbook and set it down on the coffee table with a sort of reverence he usually reserved for pieces from the archive.
"Well, all the other drawings are of things she has actually seen," he said, looking up at Anthony meaningfully.
Anthony felt the remaining blood in his face drain away when he realized what his friend meant, and lowered himself back onto the couch.
"The Fetch," he whispered. "Dear god that thing was a Fetch…"
"What's going on Lockwood?" Holly demanded at his reaction, and a glance at her face showed that she was near tears. She brought her thumb up to her lips and bit at the nail.
"Remember how Kat Godwin and Bobby Vernon thought they'd seen Ned Shaw at the department store?" he asked the others, and although it had been more of a rhetorical question, they both nodded.
"When I found her in the room of bones she was speaking to a ghost," Anthony started explaining. " I thought it was one of those poor sods from the prison, and she sounded really upset so I sliced it through."
"Did you hear what she was saying, Lockwood?" George asked, taking his glasses off of his nose and rubbing them with the seam of his sweater. Anthony doubted it would make them any cleaner.
"No, she was practically shouting and everything echoed strangely." He brushed a hand through his hair. Apparently the situation had made all of them turn to their nervous habits for comfort.
"I think that she drew what she saw that night," George said quietly. "Maybe she thought the fetch was giving a prediction? She did ask if ghosts could show the future…"
Suddenly Anthony couldn't sit still any longer. Finally he had an explanation for Lucy's sudden departure. He got up from the couch so fast Holly let out a squeak of surprise. He swiped the sketchbook from the coffee table and tucked it safely underneath his arm.
"It seems I've got something to do this afternoon. Don't wait for me to eat lunch!" He called cheerfully before rushing out of the room. In the hall he grabbed his coat from the coat rack and swung it on, keeping the sketchbook underneath it to keep it covered from the rain that pelted down on him the moment he closed the front door behind him.
He couldn't keep the bright smile off of his face as he hailed a taxi and told the driver the address he'd been longing to visit for the passed three months.
The sketchbook's form underneath his coat felt reassuring; he understood Lucy's problem now, which meant he could finally try to fix it.
A/N: Four books in, and I'm completely in love with the Lockwood & Co series. I like all the characters a lot, so I thought it would be interesting to write a about what may have been going on at 35 Portland Row after Lucy left, with a little twist.
Let me know what you thought! Comments are always appreciated.