Read Lockwood & Co. Book Three: The Hollow Boy for Free Online

One-handed, he slashed a complicated pattern through the air, shearing
through the nearest tentacles. They burst like bubbles, scattering iridescent pearls of plasm. Even with his coat all charred and crispy, even with that red circle on his forehead, he had
reasserted himself. His face was pale in the spectral light as he smiled across the attic at me. “Lucy,” he called, “we need to finish this.”
    “It’s angry!” I gasped, ducking under a grasping coil. “I got a connection with the ghost! It’s angry about something!”
    “You don’t say?” High above, George raised his knees to avoid the thrashing tentacles. “Your sensitivity is amazing, Luce. How I wish I had your Talent.”
    “Yes, that isn’t the most surprising insight you’ve ever given us.” Lockwood bent over his bag. “I’ll get a Seal. Meanwhile, you might just want to rescue
George….”
    “Anytime you like,” George said. “No hurry.” His position was looking precarious. He still dangled by one hand, and the fingers of that hand were slipping fast.
    Spinning my necklace, I leaped between the coils, feeling them dart aside. I snatched up the rapier as I passed by, skidded under the ladder, and wrenched it bodily forward, dragging its length
below George just as his grip gave way.
    He fell—and landed on the middle rungs like a scruffy sack of coal. The ladder bowed; I heard it crack. Well, that was better than him breaking his neck. He’d have made
such
an annoying ghost.
    A moment later he’d skittered down the ladder like a fireman down a pole. I tossed him his rapier.
    “What’s up there?”
    “Dead person. Angry dead person. That’s all you need to know.” Pausing only to adjust his spectacles, he leaped past to attack the coils.
    Across the room, Lockwood had brought something out of the bag. “Lucy—I’m going to throw it! Climb up and get ready to catch!” He drew back his hand, then darted aside as
a swiping tentacle narrowly missed his face. A flick of the rapier; the coil was gone. “Here it is!” he called. “It’s coming now.”
    Lockwood, of course,
could
throw. I was already moving up the ladder. A small square object came spiraling straight up and over the central beam; down it came, landing right in my hand.
Not even a fumble. Close by, George was slashing with his rapier, watching my back, carving coils asunder. I reached the top of the ladder, where it touched the beam.
    And the Source
was
there.
    After so many years, it lay with surprising neatness on its secret perch. The cobwebs that fused it to the wood had smoothed out the contours of the bones and buried them under a soft gray
shroud. You could see the remains of old-style clothes—a tweed suit, two brown shoes tilted at an angle—and the bone ridges around the dust-filled sockets of the eyes. Strands of dark
matter—was it hair or matted cobwebs?—ran like water over the lip of the beam. How had it happened? Had he purposefully climbed up there, or been tucked away (more likely) by a
murderer’s careful hand? Now was not the time to worry either way. The dead man’s fury pounded in my mind; below me, in the weaving lantern light, Lockwood and George did battle with
the coils.
    In those days the Sunrise Corporation provided silver chain nets in plastic boxes, for ease of use. I cracked the lid open, took out the folded net. I let it slip outward until it had fully
unfurled between my fingers, thin and loose like an uncooked pastry case, like a shimmering skin of stars.
    Silver snuffs out Sources. I flicked it up and over the beam, over the bones and cobwebs, as calmly and casually as a chambermaid making a bed.
    The net sank down; the fury winked out of my mind. All at once there was a hole there, an echoing silence. The coils froze; a second later they had faded from the attic like mist from a
mountaintop: one moment there, the next gone.
    How big the attic seemed without the Changer in it. We stopped dead, right where we