She gazed at me blankly. “Super silly?”

Bobby Vernon lifted a hand. “Supercilious.”

“Thanks.” I put on a stupid voice. “‘No, Lucy, not like that. Rotwell does it this way. Rotwell does it that way.’ If you like Rotwell so much, go back to that agency!”

“I didn’t like working for Rotwell! He was disgusting. He’s violent and ambitious and he doesn’t treat his employees well. But don’t pretend you’re so caring, Lucy Carlyle! I told you about what happened to me at Cotton Street, and you couldn’t have cared less!”

“That’s not true! How dare you say that?”

“Then why didn’t you show it, Lucy?”

“Because…because the same bloody thing happened to me! I lost my team as well! They all died too! All right? It upset me!”

“Well, I didn’t know that!”

“Well, I didn’t ask you to know about it, did I? It’s my business!”

“Like Lockwood’s past is your business too?” She glared at me in triumph. “I know you went into that room. I heard you from downstairs.”

“What?” I took a deep breath then, chest painful with rage. And as I did so, there was a small, drawn-out scraping sound from the checkout counter down the aisle. We all looked over: me, Holly, Bobby Vernon on the floor. At first we couldn’t see what had made the sound. Then we noticed that one of the tape dispensers, small, but heavy, made of shiny stone, was moving slowly along the surface of the counter. It went of its own volition, scratching, trembling, scraping across the glass.

It reached the side of the cash register, bumped into it, once, twice, and then again, as if seeking a way past. Then, as we watched, it began to rise up the cash register, pressing hard against it, shuddering and screeching. When it got to the top, it flipped slowly onto its side, paused, and then, with sudden violence, shot along and over the edge, to fall back down onto the glass counter with a violent crack.

We stood there, staring. Suddenly, in the silence, I could feel immense pressure stabbing at my ears. It was like a great wave suddenly hung over us, quivering, only momentarily frozen; we were in its shadow.

“Oops.” That was the skull.

“Now you’ve done it,” Bobby Vernon said.

Holly Munro and I looked at one another. Just looked. We didn’t bother trying girly smiles or anything. It was too late for that.

Too late for anything, but we gave it a go.

No sooner had the tape dispenser hit the glass than Holly and I dived behind the nearest available shelter. It was a low display case, like a kind of open-topped table, stuffed with a hundred varieties of golf socks. Holly and I crouched there, bent close, our faces nearly touching. Bobby Vernon was crumpled between us, half-conscious, breathing heavily.

It was very quiet in the room now. True, the psychic echo of our argument rebounded between the walls, on and on and on. Invisible lines of power thrummed in the room, taut as piano wire, heavy with built-up charge. But the only actual sound was a soft, rhythmic rustling. I peeped up from behind the case and looked over at the desk, at the counter with its jagged crack and the tape dispenser sticking up from the fractured glass like the bow of a sinking ship.

A little stack of papers—brochures, maybe—lay on the glass. One corner of the stack was riffling in a nonexistent wind.

The pages would ripple upward, then fall still, then ripple up again.

I ducked back down.

“Can you see anything?” Holly asked. The terror was plain in her eyes. Her voice shook with the effort of trying to rebuild her shattered emotional calm. I nodded.

She stared at me. A twist of hair had fallen in front of her face; she was chewing the end, eyes wide in the half-dark. “So…so the Fittes Manual says the first thing we have to do is establish Type,” she said.

I knew quite well what the Fittes Manual said. But damp fear had replaced the remains of anger in my belly. I just nodded again. “Yes.”

“We know it’s kinetic,” she breathed. “It moves things around. But is there any kind of apparition?”

I peeped up above the socks again. I could smell the lanolin in the wool, and the cleanness of the plastic packaging. The thought crossed my mind that Lockwood and George both needed socks, and that it would be Christmas soon; my next thought (less pleasantly) was that it was highly unlikely I’d survive the night to get to Christmas. I looked across the hall. It was now empty of all the dark shapes that had clustered there earlier. Either they’d been driven back, or absorbed into the mass of cold, pulsating energy that hung vibrating around us—energy our argument had summoned into being. I ducked my head down once more. “No.”

“No apparition? Oh, so it’s a…so it might just be a…”

“It’s a Poltergeist, Holly. Yes, it is.”

She swallowed. “Okay….”

I dropped Vernon’s leg and reached out to grip her arm. “But it’s not going to be like Cotton Street,” I whispered. “This time it’s going to be fine. You understand that? We’re going to get out of this, Holly. Come on. We can do it. We just need to get down two floors and across to the entrance. That’s not too far, is it? We do it quietly, and we do it carefully, and we don’t attract its attention.”

Over on the distant desk, the papers rippled, on-off, on-off, their hum soft and rhythmic like the purring of a giant cat.

“But Poltergeists…”

“Poltergeists are blind, Holly. They respond to emotion, noise, and stress. So listen to me. We make for the back stairs—they’re the closest. We go down to the ground floor and we find the others. We do it all step by step, stage by stage, very quietly and very calmly, and we never, ever panic. If we keep everything nice and neutral, it’s likely it won’t even notice us again.”

I gazed at her steadily in what I hoped was a calm, reassuring manner. On balance it was probably more a wild-eyed lunatic stare.

“Good luck with that….” Bobby Vernon said.

He was only half-conscious, but he knew. Poltergeists, you see…Here’s the thing: they’re bad. Hard to deal with, hard to pin down. Impossible to control. Where other Type Two Visitors always give you something to aim at, Poltergeists have no physical manifestation at all. No apparition, no substance, no shadow. This, for agents, is a major disadvantage. It doesn’t matter how faint a Phantasm, say, might be; once you’ve locked on to its shimmering translucent form, you can lay salt, strew iron, or lob flares to your heart’s content. A Raw-bones may make your bowels twist tight in abject terror, but at least you’re never in any doubt about where it is. That’s simply not the case with a Poltergeist. It’s everywhere and nowhere, and all around you, and more than any other ghost it feeds off every drop of emotion you give out. It feeds off it and uses it to move things. Just a small amount of rage or sadness can fuel its power.

Just a small amount…

Oh, God. What had we done?

What had I done, more to the point? I felt sick; I closed my eyes.

“Lucy?” Holly’s hand brushed my knee. She was giving me a wobbly grin. “It’ll be all right, you said? So…what do we do?”

I felt a flush of gratitude to her. My answering grin was probably equally wonky, and watery as hell. I jerked my head along the aisle toward the back staircase at the far end of the floor. “We get up—very slowly….We retreat a few yards at a time, along toward those doors. We just walk, we don’t hurry. We keep our heart rates down.”

“I can’t….It’s impossible.”

“Holly, we just have to do our best.”

Standing up was the hardest part. Standing up in plain view. Like I said, Poltergeists respond to sound and emotion, so technically it made no difference whether we were hiding behind a cabinet or wearing top hats and sequins and high-kicking like a pair of excited go-go dancers—provided we did it silently. But it didn’t feel that way. Just the thought of being suddenly exposed to the thing beside the counter made cramps race across my stomach on skittering spider legs. Still, we had no choice.

Whispering to Bobby Vernon to be silent, we both grabbed appropriate parts of him and, on a mouthed count of three, stood up. We stared over at the desk, at the purring pile of papers. Up and down went the pages…up and down in the cold, cold air….So far, so good. The rhythm hadn’t altered. Still, the dark crackled with psychic charge: it seemed that the tiniest movements we made would send shockwaves across the hall.

I nodded my head. Holly was nearest the staircase; that meant she would have to walk backward, arms looped under Vernon’s shoulders, with me gripping his legs, following behind. Vernon himself, eyes half open, seemed scarcely aware of what was going on. He worried me. I feared that he might suddenly call out and attract unwelcome attention.

Holly shuffled backward; I shuffled after. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the papers on the desk fluttering, fluttering….

Down along the aisle we went, between the hanging coats, pressing each foot down with tender, soundless care. Steadily we drew closer to the stairwell doors.

“Say,” a voice said in my ear, “this is exciting. I almost think you might make it.”

The skull! I rolled my eyes in dismay, biting the corner of my lip. Would his presence disturb the Poltergeist? I looked over at the desk, at the gently ruffling papers.

“Unless Holly trips and drops little Bobby and his head knocks on the floor with a whopping great thud,” the ghost continued amiably, “like a tufty coconut cracking on a rock. I honestly think this might happen. Look at the way her little hands are slipping….”

It was true. Holly had stopped, and altered her grip under Vernon’s armpits. Her face was as pale as I’d ever seen it. But we weren’t far from the doors.

“I call this a nice refreshing change,” the skull said. “You can’t talk back! Or reach around to turn my tap off. Means I can tell you what I think of you, without you giving me any lip.”

We shuffled on. I squinted frantically across the room.

It was okay. On the desk, nothing had changed.

“Don’t worry,” the skull said. “It’s not interested in me. We entities, by and large, keep ourselves to ourselves. It won’t pay any attention to what I do.”

I breathed out with relief. And just then Holly nudged a coat with her elbow, making its hanger scrape gently on the rail.

“That, on the other hand…”

My eyes flipped around; I looked at the pile of papers.

They were suddenly very still.

Holly and I exchanged glances. We waited. I counted to thirty in my head, forcing my breathing to remain calm. The room was dark and silent. Nothing happened. The papers didn’t move.

I expelled air very, very slowly. We tiptoed on.

“Hey, maybe you’re okay now!” the skull said. “Maybe it’s gone.”

An empty coat hanger on a rack on the other side of the room spun up and over in a whizzing 360-degree turn, then rocked back and forth with ever smaller movements until it was once again quite still.

“It hasn’t, you know. I was just kidding.”

We froze, watched the space. Again everything was still. I nodded to Holly. Grimly, grappling Vernon tighter, moving slightly faster, we inched along the aisle.

Away across the room, a ting of metal. One of the lights in the ceiling swung softly in the darkness. Holly started to slow, but I shook my head and we redoubled our pace toward the stairs.

We needed to hurry now. We needed to get out.

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s over there,” the skull said in my ear. “Or by the coats…”

I gritted my teeth. I knew what it was going to say.

“Truth is, it’s everywhere. It’s right on top of us. It coils around us like a snake. We’re all inside it. It has already swallowed us whole.”

All at once a squealing screech of feedback came from the speakers in the ceiling, followed by a low-level, crackling hum. Holly and I both jumped. Behind Holly’s head a pair of blue pajamas on a rail jerked too, as if someone was in them, legs bending, arms jabbing outward in a brief, appalling spasm.

Almost as fast as it had started, the energy went out of it. The pajamas hung limp, without animation.

A moment later we slammed through the swinging doors into the pitch darkness of the back stairs.

I dropped Vernon’s leg, flipped a penlight from my belt, and shoved it between my teeth. The light showed Holly, sagging against the wall, easing Vernon to the ground.

“Oh, God…” she said. “Oh, God…”

“We can’t stop here, Hol,” I hissed. “We’ve got to move. Pick him up! Come on!”

“But, Lucy—”

“Just do it!”

Onward, stumbling, down the stairs, contained within our bobbing sphere of light. We weren’t trying for quiet anymore, and we weren’t attempting to suppress the fear that, choking, rose within us. Holly was sobbing as she went; Bobby Vernon’s head bounced side to side as we careered against the walls.

We reached the turn. Behind us, the doors at the top burst open, smashing back against the wall. Their panels of glass shattered; fragments cascaded down the steps, rained past us into the dark. A squall of air buffeted against us as we collapsed onto the landing below.

“In there!” I’d been planning to keep going down, all the way to the ground floor, but I didn’t want to be stuck in the stairwell now. I nodded toward the door leading back into the store. Holly shouldered her way through—we entered the silence and darkness of Kitchenware at the far end of the first floor.

“Holly,” I whispered, “you’re tired. Swap with me. Let me go in front now.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“Side by side, then.” The aisle was wide enough for us to go abreast. It wasn’t too far. Through Kitchenware, then Ladies’ Fashions, then down the main stairs to the ground floor—that’s all we had to do.

Far off I heard voices calling us. Living voices—Lockwood, George…

“Don’t answer them,” I said. “Keep silent.”

We went as fast as we could. I kept expecting the door behind us to crash open, as if the ghost were chasing us. But Poltergeists don’t work that way.

When we were beside a stack of colanders, something slapped me in the face.

I cried out, dropping my flashlight, letting go of Vernon’s legs. He moaned, thrashed in Holly’s grip.

Another slap, stinging across my cheek. Cursing, I drew my sword, swung it around me in a wild sweep. Nothing.

In the next aisle, something smashed against saucepans.

Holly gave a yelp; a red mark bloomed like a flower on her cheekbone.

There’s only one good thing about Poltergeists: no ectoplasm, so you can’t get ghost-touch, even when you’re slapped around by them. It almost makes up for the higher than average chance of being brained by a sofa or skewered by a banister rail. We snatched Vernon up, staggered on.

Somewhere behind, a clattering; dozens of utensils cascading to the floor. And now came a horrendous din, a tumbling of tortured metal, peppered with grunts and snarls, as if a great beast was thrashing and writhing in their midst.