The Screaming Staircase

  From the shadows had come the creak of settling wood. Someone heavy easing their weight into a chair.

  “Is he in here?” George whispered.

  I shook my head. “It’s just sounds, echoes from the past….” All the same, my heart was beating fast; my head felt light and my limbs heavy. Fear pressed in on us. Now I could hear a familiar sound, very polite and delicate. The sound of knife and fork on china. “I think I hear him eating.”

  Someone coughed in the dark. Someone smacked their lips.

  “Can we go out for a minute?” I said. “I need to get some air.”

  “Agreed,” Lockwood said. “It’s hot in here, isn’t it?

  No one was eager to stay. We hurried to the door, all four of us. As we did so, an appalling scream echoed through the house, filled with both pain and terror. It was the scream of a murdered man, or someone terrified to death. Somebody clutched my arm; I don’t know if it was George or Holly.

  “Oh no…” I said. “Kipps…”

  Lockwood was out of the room in a flash, long coat swirling behind him. “Holly—you wait here. Lucy—”

  “Stuff that. I’m coming with you.”

  Through the kitchen we ran, Lockwood, George, and I. Along the hall, past the basement door, around to the foot of the stairs. The house was deathly still. Up the steps, three at a time, and onto the landing—

  Where Kipps was still sitting placidly in his iron circle, reading a novel by the light of his ring of candles. He had a packet of biscuits open by one knee, and a flask of coffee by the other. His head was resting on one hand; he wore a look of boredom, which changed to puzzlement as we careered to a halt above him.

  “What do you idiots want now?”

  He hadn’t heard a thing.

  It was cold out on the front porch, and there was a thin rain falling in the London night. You could hear it pattering on the hedges and on the concrete drive, and dripping from a broken gutter. Otherwise the city was quiet; we were in the dead hours, and nothing living was abroad. Cold, rain, and silence: that was a combo that suited us all right then. We needed to calm down.

  One of the dangers of spending too much time in a haunted house is that you begin to follow its patterns and its rules. Since the rules inside the building are invariably warped and twisted, you find yourself slowly losing contact with the principles that keep you safe. We’d fallen into this trap in the Guppy house, separating too easily, becoming prey to individual psychic attacks. Holly, George, and I had all been affected; our nerves were on edge, and we huddled in silence by the porch lantern, munching chocolate and staring out into the dark. Lockwood and Kipps had so far not been directly targeted, Kipps either because he had rarely strayed from his iron circle, or because he no longer had the sensitivity to pick up on subtle manifestations. As for Lockwood, perhaps he was less vulnerable, and the entity had sensed his strength—it was hard to say.

  Certainly he seemed relaxed enough now. “There you go, Luce,” he said, catching my eye. “Aren’t you pleased you came out with us tonight? No one can say that Lockwood and Company doesn’t show you a good time.”

  I took a swig from my thermos. The night air was doing its job. My head felt clearer now. “Best evening out I’ve had in ages,” I said. “Random body parts and mortal fear? That’s better than Indian food.”

  He grinned. “You’re doing great. If it was just Holly, George, and me, we’d have had a couple of visuals, maybe, but nothing more. Thanks to you, we’ve got almost too much information.”

  I couldn’t help but smile at him. Compliments from Lockwood were always nice to hear. “Too much and not enough,” I said. “I’ve heard Guppy in half the rooms of the house. I’ve heard him walking around, eating, whistling, even chopping in the kitchen. Holly and George and I have all seen secondary flashbacks—again in different rooms. Just about the only thing we haven’t seen is the apparition itself. And we’re no closer to finding the Source.”

  Lockwood shook his head. “I think we are. The table, the bones, that pot on the stove—they’re all aspects of the apparition. Guppy isn’t in one portion of the house, he is the house. He’s not locked in one small area; he’s everywhere. George—you told us Guppy almost never left the property if he could help it. Clearly he was obsessed with the place. He may be long dead, but that still holds. I think he’s still here.”

  “Couldn’t it be the spirit of the victim, though?” Kipps said. “Thanks to George we know how his remains ended up in every room. Feet in the lounge, toenails in the pantry—”

  “Eyeballs in the pantry,” George said. “In a jar.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Kipps growled. “I don’t need the details again. The point is, he could just as easily be responsible for all this, couldn’t he? And you reckoned you heard his scream….”

  “We did,” I said, “but I still think it’s Guppy. All the sounds relate to his horrible activities. He’s re-creating it for his own pleasure, and to freak us out.”

  “Is the whole house the Source, then?” Holly asked in a small voice. She’d been subdued since the incident in the dining room. “Is that possible? If so, maybe we should just burn the place down.” She gave a little gulping laugh. “I’m not really suggesting that, obviously.”

  George adjusted his glasses. “I don’t know….We’ve set fire to houses before.”

  “Deliberate arson is not likely to impress Fittes or Barnes,” Quill Kipps said. “Besides, there will be a more localized Source somewhere—the psychic heart of the haunting. The problem is, no one’s ever been able to find it. Right, I’m going to make a suggestion in my official capacity as observer for the Fittes Agency. In our company, when psychic danger has been experienced and you haven’t got a clue what to do, the general rule is to retreat. Retreat and recalibrate. Live to fight another day.”

  “You mean give up?” Lockwood was incredulous; he patted Kipps fondly on the shoulder. “That’s not the Lockwood and Company way.”

  Kipps shrugged. “Then it’ll keep sapping your spirits with little attacks until you’re too frazzled to notice you’ve been ghost-touched. Unless you can draw the ghost out and persuade it to reveal the Source, which is hardly likely, I don’t see how you’ll ever get anywhere.”

  Lockwood snapped his fingers so suddenly that we all jumped. “That’s it! You’re a genius, Quill! We’ll draw it out! Guppy’s been having his way for far too long. Luce, you’ve experienced most of his tricks. I’d say the kitchen was where most of the phenomena have been concentrated, wouldn’t you?”

  “No question about it,” I said.

  “Then let’s assume that that’s the room he cares about the most.” Lockwood’s eyes glittered. “I wonder whether we can upset him. Everyone drink up. It’s time we fetched our crowbars.”

  Short, light crowbars, the kind favored by burglars in the days when ordinary criminals dared to go out at night, are a standard piece of agency equipment. They’re used mostly for knocking through walls or prying up floorboards in search of bones and relics, but they’re more versatile than that. Over the years I’d used mine for breaking open waterlogged chests, levering a coffin out of a sandpit, and—since the bar was helpfully made of iron—skewering a Tom O’Shadows to a door. I’d never gone as far as destroying a kitchen with it, but there was a first time for everything.

  It was silent in the house as we went in and filed back up the hall. It was even quieter than when we’d first arrived: there was no psychic pressure at all. Even the lack of pressure was ominous: it suggested that something had drawn back and was watching us. We had our crowbars over our shoulders—except for Kipps, who’d found a rusty mallet in the garage, which he thought was even better. We passed the dark marks on the wallpaper, the handprints on the glass pane. Lockwood closed the kitchen door behind us. There was the drab little space, with its wooden cabinets, its notched butcher block, its old stained sink with ugly taps. The moon had moved in front of the house, and the kitchen was darker than before. George’s sil
ver bell was still on the counter. He moved it to the windowsill, out of harm’s way.

  We double-checked the iron chains in the center of the room and relit some candles that had blown out. Holly turned the lantern down low. Then we gathered by the butcher block. Lockwood inserted his crowbar into a narrow space between a countertop and the cupboard below.

  “Kipps and I will start,” he said. “The rest of you keep watch.”

  He heaved up the crowbar.

  Lockwood said this was no real crime, given what had been done here. Even so, my nerves jangled as the old wood splintered. Maybe it was rotten; certainly it came apart easily, with a single great crack that echoed around the room. I imagined that sound reverberating through the rest of the house.

  Maybe we all imagined that, because for a moment, no one moved. Even Lockwood paused with the crowbar still embedded in the countertop.

  Nothing but silence.

  So he went to work again, ripping into the brittle particleboard, forcing it back on itself so that it burst in a shower of splinters. After a bit he moved back and let Kipps take over with the mallet. Drawers fractured; shelves snapped like broken bones. Already a great hole had opened to the left of the metal sink, and the kitchen that had remained untouched for thirty years was altered irrevocably.

  Kipps took a swig of water. We listened. The house was quiet. He began again.

  While the mallet swung, I moved away across the room, out of Kipps’s sight. I felt in my backpack, and twisted the lever of the ghost-jar.

  “Ooh, the tension,” whispered the voice. “Even I’m nervous, and I’m a ghost. Five fools trying their damnedest to rouse a monster. But what will you do if he comes?”

  “Skull,” I whispered, “it’s your last chance. You’ve been useless this evening. Swallow your pride and give me some help here, or I swear next time I’ll leave you at home under the bed.”

  There was a faint, dry chuckle. “Oh, next time? But there won’t be a next time with Lockwood and Company, remember? It’ll just be you and me, mucking along together as before. That’s our future, clear as day!”

  “Yeah? Here’s another future,” I snarled. “See this crowbar? I’ll smash you and your jar with that and bury the pieces in the garden if you don’t help me out.”

  The chuckling stopped. “Bit harsh.” The voice grew thoughtful. “One day, Lucy, I’ll have you in my power, and we’ll see who dances to whose tune. Well, what can I tell you that you don’t already know? The creature infests the house; his essence was drawn into the walls by sweat and blood and hideous obsession. Years pass; his awareness comes and goes. I felt it when we entered, then it drew back. He is sluggish. He dozes; perhaps you have seen his dreams.”

  “But now—” I said, then stopped as an immense effort from Kipps broke a mustard-colored panel and sent it flying across the room.

  “Congratulations. You’ve woken him, and he’s not happy.”

  Kipps was standing upright, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. Lockwood had pulled some fragments of particleboard clear. He lifted his crowbar, ready to resume. I held up my hand to pause them.

  Far off in the house, I heard it.

  Click-click-click.

  And all at once I knew what it was.

  It was sound of teeth being tapped together.

  Click-click-click…

  It was a habit he’d had. He did it as he shuffled slowly around the house, looking in his recipe books, watching his neighbors from his windows.

  Click-click-click…Click-click-click…

  Watching, watching…Eventually selecting one.

  “Got company,” I said.

  For a moment, none of us moved. Four pale faces stared at me in the swirling candlelight of the ruined kitchen. Kipps and Lockwood stood ankle-deep in shattered wood. They were covered in sawdust, glistening with sweat; they were as pale and hideous as Bone Men. Holly looked like a particularly anxious Floating Bride. George, hair disarranged, glasses shining like headlights, might have passed for some unhinged spirit manifesting as an owl. We looked and listened.

  I pointed upward. The lightbulb in the ceiling juddered as heavy, shuffling footsteps crossed the room upstairs.

  “Excellent,” Lockwood said. “If he’s stirring, we’re on the right track. That means he definitely doesn’t like it when we do something like this!” He swung the crowbar level with his head and smashed in the side of a cupboard halfway up the wall.

  Click-click-click…

  Something was walking along the landing, heading for the stairs.

  “Come on, Guppy. You can move faster than that.” Lockwood wrenched at a spar of wood that jutted up from the floor. The units beside the sink had been completely destroyed, exposing bare brick and moldy floor. He struck the sink’s metal support, snapping it in two. He was aflame with sudden defiant energy, swooping and darting like quicksilver, tugging and striking and kicking away the debris. Even Kipps moved back to give him space; the rest of us could do little but watch as he sought to summon a horror by the application of pure will.

  George sidled close to me. “What does Lockwood plan to do when it…arrives?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Heavy footsteps on the stairs; I heard steps creaking as immense pressure weighed them down.

  “Lucy,” George whispered, “can I share something personal with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you’d rather I didn’t, you being a free agent and all, you only have to say.”

  “It’s still me, isn’t it? Just spit it out.”

  “Okay…” He nodded, took a short breath. “I really don’t want to see this one.”

  “Guppy?”

  “Right. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of apparitions in my time,” George said, “and some of them have been…pretty grisly, you know. You remember that wormy girl we saw near Hackney Gardens? I couldn’t eat Swiss cheese for months after that. But there’s something about this one—”

  I nodded. “I know. You don’t have to say it. Me, too.”

  As I spoke, I was staring at the glazed glass panels in the kitchen door. They were fairly opaque, but you could see the glow of the lantern on the distant porch and the snuff-lights on the stairs. This light was stirring violently, and dimming, and now a great dark shape moved slowly into view at the far end of the hall. Holly gave a little squeal.

  “Apparition’s in sight, Lockwood,” George said. “What do we do?”

  “Exactly what we’re already doing.” Lockwood was grinning, his hair flopping over his face. “We bring him to us, and we wipe him out. Stand firm. He’s trying to break us all with fear.”

  And making a pretty good job of it, if my own ghost-lock was anything to go by. I could barely move, but I edged to the back corner of the room. The shape was growing. Teeth clicked, lips smacked together. I could hear feet in carpet slippers shuffling along the hall.

  I stepped away, turning my back on Kipps again. “Skull,” I hissed, “now would be a terrific opportunity to prove your worth. There’ll be no more talk of crowbars from me if you can spot the Source.”

  “I see….First it’s threats, then sweet words. Have you no dignity?”

  “Not right now. Can you sense where it is?”

  “Well, from the efforts it’s making to get to you, I’d say it thinks you’re on to something.”

  “The Source is near!” I called. I sprang across to the mess of shattered wood. “What’s behind those broken cabinets? Keep an eye out for anything!”

  Crouching beside the ruined sink, I began to hurl aside pieces of wood. Kipps and Lockwood joined me at once, but Holly and George stood transfixed, staring at the door. In moments a small space was cleared. I peered under the sink. The floorboards were rotten at the back, and in places didn’t reach the wall. Loops of pipework dangled in the shadows like exposed intestines. I shone my torch around the darkened recess.

  I thought of Emma Marchment’s ghost—her hidden treasure, her precious thing. Guppy had kept
something, too; he’d secreted it somewhere here.

  “Any luck, Luce?” Lockwood’s voice was calm.

  “We’re close. How long have we got?”

  “Oh, about thirty seconds.”

  I squinted over my shoulder; beyond the glass, the shadow had resolved into a definite shape. You could see the black outline of the vast wide head, the swell of stomach spreading out from wall to wall. There was the rustling of cloth against the wallpaper, there was the clicking and clacking of the great loose mouth. I heard a crack of tendons, a knee protesting under dreadful weight.

  It was almost at the door.

  I swore under my breath. “The only place I can see,” I said, “is where that floorboard’s broken away. There, in the corner, behind the pipework—do you see?”

  In an instant Lockwood was lying on his front, peering at the remotest portion of the wall. His flashlight turned on. “I see the hole. There’s something shining in it. It’s quite far in—would be hard to reach…”

  Holly screamed. She was gazing at the door. There, halfway up, pressed against the glass: a huge white hand.

  Lockwood jumped up. “George, snap out of it! We’ll need your strength for this. Take a look.” He tossed the flashlight to George, and in the same motion took his rapier from his belt.

  Fingers curled around the edge of the door. The nails were broken and fouled with dirt.

  George sprang over the pile of wood and lowered himself down beside me. He squinted into the cavity. “I see it….It’s a jar of some kind. But the pipe’s in the way.”

  Lockwood flicked his coat back; he was checking the equipment on his belt. “Break the pipe if necessary.” He walked across the room. “The rest of you, get inside the circle.”

  I rose to my feet. “Lockwood,” I said, “what are you—?”

  “I’m going to buy George some time. Get in the circle, Lucy.”

  The door was opening; a vast black shadow spilled through it like a lolling tongue. Lockwood threw a salt-bomb into the crack; there was a horrible high-pitched scream. Then he had slipped through the door and pulled it shut behind him.