The Screaming Staircase

  “I can still hear it,” I said. Every now and then the chopping paused, as if the knife were forcing its way through something particularly hard, but it always resumed.

  Lockwood’s eyes met mine. “Then let’s see who it is who’s joined us.”

  He reached for the handle, turned it, sprang forward into the room. As he did so, the sounds cut out. I was at his side, a salt-bomb in my fist; George and Kipps were pressing at our backs. We came to a halt, surveying the empty kitchen, where the sharp shadows of the cypress trees hung in moonlight on the countertops, and the candles flickered gently around our circle on the cracked linoleum floor.

  “Nothing?” Kipps breathed.

  My own breath had been pent up; I forced it out hard. “It stopped, the sound, as soon as we came in.”

  Lockwood touched my arm. “It’s playing tricks, which is to be expected.”

  “Nothing,” Kipps said heavily. He looked at me.

  “I did hear it,” I snapped. The sudden deflation we’d all felt on entering the room had made us edgy. George was swearing colorfully under his breath, Holly was visibly shaking.

  “No one’s saying you didn’t, Luce.” Of all of us, only Lockwood seemed unaffected. He remained quite still, eyes narrowed, gazing around the kitchen. Then he clipped his rapier to his belt and glanced at his thermometer. “Temp’s normal,” he said. “There’s no visual phenomena that I can see.”

  “You’re forgetting the glass door,” I said. “No light shone through it a moment ago.”

  “True.” He rummaged in a pocket of his coat, produced a paper bag of chocolates. “Everyone take two, and let’s get the thermoses out. High time for a cup of tea.”

  We stood there, drinking, calming down. It’s never good to let your emotions get the better of you in a haunted house. Ghosts feed off them and grow strong.

  “So, it’s nine-o-three p.m., and that’s our first proper phenomenon,” Lockwood said. “Looks as if Fittes and Barnes were right—this thing mainly manifests via sounds. That means Lucy’s going to bear the brunt of it. You’re okay with that, Luce?”

  I nodded. “That’s why you brought me in.”

  “I know, but you need to be happy with it.”

  My heart was still pounding, but I kept my voice cool and professional. “It’s not a problem.”

  Lockwood nodded slowly. “Okay…so we go on much as before. We’ll meet again at eleven thirty, see if anyone has a clue to the Source. Those of us on stationary posts can swap rooms then. Meanwhile, we call to each other whenever we have the slightest doubt about anything.”

  One after the other, everyone slipped away—everyone except George and me. We remained standing in the kitchen. It seemed the obvious place for me to concentrate my efforts, and George had clearly had a similar idea. From a bag he brought out the odd little contrivance I’d seen before—a silver bell suspended from a wooden frame on a lattice of thin wires. With extreme care, elbows out wide, fingers clinically spread, he placed it on a butcher-block table in a shaft of moonlight, and stood back to consider it.

  I could contain myself no longer. “George, what is that?”

  He ran a hand distractedly through his mop of sandy hair. “PEWS. Psychic Early Warning System. New item from the Rotwell Institute. Half of these zinc wires are standard, and half have been coated with spider’s silk, which reacts with special sensitivity to ghostly emanations. The movement differential between them disturbs the balance of the central bar, which…” He glanced at me and shrugged. “It’s supposed to ring before the ghost appears, basically.”

  “And does it work?”

  “Can’t say. First time I’ve tried it.”

  “You think it’s more sensitive than our own Talents?”

  “I don’t know. Better than mine, maybe. Maybe not as good as yours.” His voice was flat. He turned away to survey the circle in the center of the room. “I think we should reinforce the defenses here. I don’t know why, I just do. Can you fetch me those chains over there?”

  “Sure.” I did so. “George,” I said, “you know I’m very happy to be working alongside you all again.”

  There was a silence. “Are you?” he said. “That surprises me.”

  I set the chains down with a clatter. I didn’t look up. I could feel him gazing at me. “And why wouldn’t I be?”

  He didn’t answer for a time, but knelt to adjust the chains, pulling them around to envelop the existing circle. He did so methodically, carefully, in that way he tackled every important task, creating a wall of double thickness. “Well,” he said at last, “there’s Holly.”

  “Not you as well!” I let out an angry oath. “I keep telling everyone. I didn’t leave because of her. Didn’t you see us earlier? Didn’t you see us chatting at the café? We smiled and laughed and everything.”

  “Just because you managed a fleeting conversation without strangling each other with your bare hands doesn’t make you bosom buddies,” George said. He took off his glasses and rubbed them thoughtfully on his sweater. “I think we’ll add some snuff-lights, too—got any handy?”

  “In the plastic Mullet’s bag.” I found it, took some, threw the bag over to him. “We get along fine now, actually,” I said. “Holly and I get on like a house on fire.”

  George nodded. “Sure you do. As in savage destruction and widespread loss of life.” He tossed me a box of matches.

  “That,” I said stiffly, “was before the Poltergeist. Afterward, we sorted things out.”

  “The Poltergeist was you sorting things out,” George said, and in a way he was quite right. “You left because you got so mad at her.”

  “No. I left because I lost control of my Talents,” I said. “Because I roused ghosts and endangered you all, and I couldn’t face doing it again.” I lit some candles and stood back. “Anyway, I’m here tonight.”

  George’s face was expressionless. “Oh, yes. So you are. See how grateful I am.” He broke off and looked at me. “Now what?”

  I’d raised a hand for silence. Slow, heavy footsteps were passing overhead. With each impact the ceiling vibrated and the hanging light (it was a single naked bulb) jerked from side to side. I heard the creak of a door. Then silence.

  I looked at George. “Hear any of that? See the light?”

  “I caught it swinging. No sounds. What was it?”

  “Footsteps. In the back bedroom. Think Kipps would be strolling around in there?”

  “Not a chance. He’ll be safe in his circle.”

  “That’s what I think, too. We should go upstairs and take a look.”

  George made a nervous adjustment to his glasses. “Yes…we should.”

  “So let’s go.”

  We passed swiftly along the narrow hallway to the stairs, turned and went up, two steps at a time, until we came out onto the landing. Kipps, sitting with his rapier on his knees, raised his eyebrows as we passed him, but we didn’t stop. The corridor was quiet and dark; the door at the end was open, revealing a sliver of the back bedroom, softly contoured by the moonlight. We moved swiftly, silently toward it. Halfway along, I heard the clicking sound again. Click-click-click—three clicks, a pause, and then the same sound repeated. It was a crisp, pearly little noise, intimate and oddly familiar. It was impossible to tell where it came from.

  I shone my flashlight into the bathroom as we passed. As the light moved across the wooden floor, I thought I saw someone lying in the bathtub. I jerked my hand up; the swell of shadow fell away, dropping in sync with the rising beam. No, it was empty, just a hollow space of dust and cobwebs. A trick of the mind and light.

  George had moved past me, making for the bedroom. Suddenly he drew up short, grimacing in pain. “Ow! Ah!”

  My rapier was in my hand; I was right by him. “What is it?”

  “Stepped into a cold spot—just cut straight through me.” He scrabbled at his belt, stared at the thermometer. “Came and went in a flash…Ah, it really hurt….Now it’s gone.”

  “Are
you okay?”

  “Fine. Just shocked me. Temp’s normal now.”

  The bedroom was quiet, too, though one cupboard door seemed to have opened of its own accord since we’d last been in. Also, the clicking noise had stopped. Neither of us could detect anything out of the ordinary.

  “Lockwood was right,” George said. “This thing’s playing tricks, most of them with sounds.” He looked back along the corridor, gave the watching Kipps a wave. “Don’t you have that foul skull with you? What’s it got to say for itself? It never used to be short of an opinion.”

  “Hard to get anything out of it tonight,” I said. “It’s in a grump. It can’t believe I’m working with Lockwood and Co. again.”

  “Jealous,” George said. “Acting like a jilted lover. It probably thought it had you all to itself. You’re the only thing that ties it to the living world. Well, we’ve all got our problems. Right, I’m going to put another PEWS in the lounge. You might want to encourage the skull to talk. This place gives me the creeps, and I haven’t the first clue what the Source could be.”

  Nor did I. Nor did any of us, and the pressure of that ignorance weighed most heavily on me. Our vigil wore on; and steadily the repertoire of noises I experienced in that house began to multiply. I heard the footsteps several times more, always when I was downstairs, always echoing from the floor above. It was a peculiar, shuffling, slapping step, both abrupt and dragging, the kind that might be made by loose-fitting carpet slippers on a pair of swollen feet. Twice, once when I was in the basement and once in the living room, I heard a snatch of heavy, labored breathing, as if a very large person was struggling to move around. And once, when standing in the hallway, I heard behind me a soft, continuous rasping, as might have been caused by cloth, pressed against misshapen flesh, brushing along the wall. Any one of those would have been enough to unsettle me; taken together, and with none of the others hearing anything, they began to prey on my mind.

  As haunted houses went, it was a noisy one. I understood why Penelope Fittes had wanted me there.

  Penelope Fittes. Not Lockwood. Whenever I thought of that, annoyance speared through me. But these last few months I’d become good at damping down my annoyance in perilous places. And nowhere in this house was as perilous, it seemed to me, as the dowdy wood-and-mustard-colored kitchen. I wanted to survey it properly; connect with what had happened there. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it was the fastest way to get to the heart of the haunting. I would clear my mind, do the job, and go home.

  Eleven thirty came; we rendezvoused in the living room again. For everyone else, it had been a quiet couple of hours, with nothing but low-level malaise and creeping fear to disturb their vigil. I recounted my experiences, and Lockwood again questioned me closely, probing to see if I was still calm. Again I reassured him. After that, people swapped roles: George went to the basement, Holly to the first floor. Lockwood would be the roving anchor, connecting everyone during the midnight hour. I returned to the kitchen.

  As I entered, I thought I heard the briefest snatch of whistling, followed by the three rapid clicks. Then nothing.

  “Skull?” I said. “Did you hear that?”

  No answer. I’d had enough of this. The skull had been silent ever since our arrival. I took the jar out of the backpack. The ghost’s face floated in the green ichor. It still wore its haughty expression; as I watched, it slowly but studiedly rotated away from me. I set the jar on the floor beside the chains and walked around it to catch up with the face. “Didn’t you hear?” I demanded. “The phenomena are increasing. What’s your take on them?”

  The ghost stopped rotating. It looked blankly left and right, as if suddenly aware of me. “Oh, you’re talking to me now?”

  “Yes, I am. There’s something building here, and I sense mortal danger. I’m wondering if you have any perspective on it.”

  The ghost adopted an expression of enormous unconcern. Its nostrils dilated; I heard a dismissive sniff. “Like you care a bean what I think.”

  I looked around the moonlit kitchen, silent, seemingly innocuous, but drenched in evil. “Dear old skull. I do care, and I’m asking you as a…as a…”

  “I detect hesitation,” the skull said. “As a friend?”

  I scowled. “Well, no. Obviously not.”

  “As a respected colleague, then?”

  “Even that would be stretching it. No, I’m asking you as someone who genuinely values your opinion, despite your wicked nature, your vicious temperament, and my better judgment.”

  The face regarded me. “Ooh, okay…I see you’re going for the virtues of simple honesty here, rather than the honeyed words of flattery. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, go boil your backside in a bucket. It’s not good enough. You’re not getting a word of wisdom out of me.”

  I gave a cry of rage. “You are so huffy! George said you were jealous, and I’m beginning to think he was right.” I bent down and twisted the dial closed.

  At that moment I heard a soft bubbling noise. A rattle and a popping. I turned around.

  An old black-and-white stove sat in one corner of the kitchen. It was dark; no gas flames had been lit in it for thirty years. Nevertheless, there was something moving on top of it now, something rattling on a dusty burner.

  It was a saucepan, a big one. I took a slow step toward it. The pan jerked and shook vigorously; whatever was inside was coming to a boil. Water fizzed and spat; a ring of small bubbles stacked themselves against the greasy rim.

  I didn’t want to look, but I had to see. I had to see what was cooking in the pan.

  I started toward it. Slowly, slowly I crept across the kitchen. The side of the pan shone silver in the moonlight, but the interior was black. Something roundish sat there; the bubbles crowned and cradled it. There was a rich, gamey scent, carried on hot, wet air.

  Closer, closer. Rattle, rattle went the pan. I unclipped my flashlight from my belt, and lifted it toward the burner….

  “Lucy!”

  “Ah!” Next thing—me spinning around, flashlight turning on in Lockwood’s face. He gasped and held up his arm, blocking the light with his cuff.

  “What are you doing, Luce? Put out that light.”

  “What am I doing? Don’t you see the—” I turned, raised the flashlight, shone the beam hard across the space. But the stovetop was empty. The pan was gone, and the air was clear and quiet. Moonlight shone through the window. I switched off the flashlight, stowed it away.

  Lockwood had moved between me and the stove. “What did you see?”

  “Something cooking,” I said. “Something cooking on the stove. It’s gone now,” I added, needlessly.

  He pushed his hair back and frowned at me. “I saw your face—you were mesmerized by it. It had snared you. It was drawing you in.”

  “I wasn’t snared at all. I just wanted to see—”

  “Exactly. I’ve seen you look like that before. All the phenomena are concentrated on you, Lucy. No one else is getting anything. I’m worried. Maybe we should call this off.”

  I stared at him, feeling a surge of irritation. “That’s why I’m here, Lockwood,” I said. “I sense things; I draw them out. You have to trust me, that’s all.”

  “Of course I trust you.” He held my gaze. “It still concerns me.”

  “Well, it needn’t.” I looked away. There on the butcher-block table was George’s bell, sparkling in the moonlight. It was a useless object. We’d had a visitation a few feet away, and it hadn’t done a thing. “I can cope with all that,” I said. “As you should know. If you actually want me here.”

  There was a pause. “Of course I do,” Lockwood said. “I asked you, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you asked me. But it was Penelope Fittes who asked for me, and that’s the difference.”

  “Lucy, what on earth are you—?” Lockwood said, and in the next instant he whirled around: the door to the hall had crashed open.

  “George!”

  He caree
red forward, glasses crooked, eyes wild. “Lucy, Lockwood, quick, come and look! Here, the basement.”

  We pushed past him, into the hall, where the entrance to the basement gaped wide. Lockwood shone his flashlight down the steep flight. The light made a yellow oval on the concrete floor. “What is it? Where?”

  “Bones! Bones and—and bits and pieces. All lying in a muddle at the bottom of the stairs!”

  We stared down at the concrete, rough and bare and blank. “Where?”

  George gestured wildly. “Well, of course they’re gone now, aren’t they? Too much to hope that they’d stay put while I was getting you!”

  “Maybe they’re not gone,” I said. “Lockwood, your Sight’s best of all. If you go down—”

  A shrill cry echoed through the house. That was Holly. Lockwood, George, and I took one look at each other and ran back through the kitchen into the little dining room. There stood Holly, elegantly distraught, staring at a blank space in front of the window.

  We had our rapiers ready. “Solomon Guppy?”

  She shook her head, face pale in the moonlight. “No.”

  “Well, what did you see?”

  “Nothing, just a table. But on it—”

  “Yes?”

  “It was too dark to make out. Plates, cutlery.” She shuddered. “Some kind of roast.”

  “Oh, yuck,” George said. “And I think I just saw the off-cuts in the basement.”

  “You want to know the worst of it?” Holly’s voice was faint; she cleared her throat and spoke more calmly. “There was this little white napkin, neatly folded beside the plate. I don’t know why, but that detail…it really got to me. The whole thing was just a snapshot. Lasted a fraction of a second, then it was gone.”

  “The problem with all these snapshots,” George said fiercely, “is there’s nothing to stick a sword into. There’s no clue to where the Source could—Lucy?” I’d gone rigid. “Luce? What is it? You hear him again?”

  They stood beside me, the three of them in the darkness of the dining room, waiting for my word. “Not exactly him,” I said slowly, “but…yes. Yes, I do.”