The Screaming Staircase

  The lunch hour proceeded; the lines dwindled. Discarded sandwich wrappers drifted like baby ghosts across the green. I waited without impatience. The vetting room attendants began their work at dawn, and would do another shift that afternoon. It was a long day. Food was necessary. Sooner or later, he would come.

  And so it was that, at approximately 12:36 p.m., I saw a familiar freckled young man tripping swiftly down from Sekforde Street. He wore a raincoat over his jumpsuit, and his cropped fair hair was obscured beneath a knit cap. His fists were driven deep into his coat pockets, and his narrow shoulders were raised high. It seemed that Harold Mailer felt the cold.

  I peeled myself off the bench and watched him go past. He crossed the green and disappeared into a baked potato joint, from which he presently emerged carrying a bulky paper bag. Looking neither right nor left, but going slightly more slowly now, he started back the way he had come.

  I did not wait for him but went on ahead, walking up Sekforde Street at a brisk pace, until I located a small alley on the correct side of the road. It was dark, evil-smelling, and mostly filled with trash cans, which suited me very well. I ducked inside and waited, and soon came footsteps on the sidewalk that told me Harold Mailer drew near.

  There may be praying mantises that can strike with greater speed. If so, I haven’t met them. One moment Mailer was meandering along in the bright spring sunlight, sniffing happily at the contents of his bag; the next he found himself pinned against the cold wet bricks of an alley with my knee in his groin and my elbow pressed against his neck.

  “Hello, Harold,” I said.

  He made a curiously squeaky noise that might have meant anything. I shifted my elbow slightly. The strangulated cough that followed wasn’t much better.

  “Lucy! What are you…what are you doing?”

  “Just wanted a word with you, Harold.”

  “Can’t we do it at the booth? I’m late. Got to get back. My shift—”

  “Couple of questions for you. Private ones. Best done quietly, down here.”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “This morning,” I said, “somebody stole something from me. They broke into my apartment and took a valuable ghost-jar, and the relic it contained. They didn’t take my money or any of my other valuables. Just the jar. No one knew about that jar, Harold. No one but you.”

  Harold Mailer’s eyes had a hooded quality that made them look both sleepy and evasive. They flicked from side to side, as if seeking help, then steadied. He grinned at me, his top lip clammy with perspiration. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t taken anything! Let go!”

  “The last time I came to Clerkenwell you saw the skull in the jar, Harold. I know you did. Then you told somebody about it. Who?”

  He struggled a bit then, so I increased the pressure on his windpipe. It was probably a mistake, since he coughed all over me, but I’d never beaten anyone up before.

  “So what if I saw the jar?” he croaked when I relented. “Why would I care what weird stuff you had? Why would it mean anything to me?”

  “Oh, but haunted relics mean a lot to you, don’t they?” I said. “More than you let on. Let me ask you something else. Three nights ago I brought you a mummified head. You took it and gave me a receipt. What did you do with it then?”

  “The head? I burned it! You saw me!”

  “No, Harold. No, you didn’t. You kept it. You sold it. And I know that, because it was bought up at a black market auction the very same day.”

  “What? You’re mad!”

  “Am I? I saw it there.”

  That was a bit of a lie, but what can you do? Harold Mailer would just have gone on denying it, which would have wasted my time. Besides, Flo had seen it, and she was reliable.

  He moistened his lips. “What were you doing at a black market sale?”

  “What are you doing selling forbidden artifacts, Harold? You know the penalties for black market trade. You know how seriously Barnes takes this—or you will very soon, when I go to see him.”

  “This is so mad, Lucy. You’re insane.”

  “Who do you sell this stuff to, Harold? For the last time: Who did you tell about my skull?”

  Close-up, I could see that his eyes were greenish, flecked with yellow-brown. Something changed in them then; defiance turned to fear, and I knew I had him.

  “Can’t tell you,” he gasped. “I can’t. Upon my life. The walls have ears.”

  “We’re in an alley, Harold. No one’s here. The only ears littering the place”—I brought my rapier slowly into view—“are going to be yours, if you don’t start being helpful.”

  Since I’d collared him, one of his knobbly hands had been scrabbling at my wrist. For a moment, just for a moment, I felt the quality of the pressure change and knew he was considering fighting back. What would have happened then, I don’t know; he was as tall as me, and not much weaker, and I wouldn’t really have been able to cut off his ears or any other part of him. But he was a coward, physically as well as morally, and the moment passed.

  “All right, all right, give me a little space.” He blew out his lips as I moved back a step, holding my rapier at the ready. He flexed his shoulders, a small, scared teen in an oversized coat, trying to rustle up some courage. “I need time to think. I need time….What’s that rank smell, anyway? Is it your coat?”

  “No, Harold, it’s the alley.”

  “Smells like stale sweat.”

  “Are we going to argue about odors now? I want answers.”

  “Okay.” He was looking up the alley, twitchy as a jackrabbit, and at first I thought he was thinking of making a bolt for it; but it was a different kind of twitchiness—he was frightened of who else might be near. A few yards away, in the sunlit street, furnace workers were strolling past in ones and twos, but none of them looked our way.

  “Okay,” Harold Mailer said again, “I’ll tell you—not that I know that much. Some men made contact with me three months ago. Black marketeers, I guess—I don’t know. They offered me money if I could slip them the best Sources that came in. Since the rules were tightened, the market for artifacts has gotten so hot; there are some people who’ll do anything for them. I needed the cash, Lucy. You don’t know what it’s like, working here; you get paid peanuts, and the Fittes bosses treat you like scum. It’s not like being an agent—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Skip the sob story. So you pass them the Sources, and burn substitutes in their place.”

  “Only the best ones, the most powerful pieces. It’s easy enough; no one ever looks closely at what we roll into the fire.” He tried a weak grin. “I mean, where’s the harm in it, really? Doesn’t hurt no one.”

  I pressed the rapier against his belly. “Is that so? You forget, they stole my property. Because you told them about it. You gave them the tip. Why?”

  “I’m sorry, I know that was wrong. It’s just, they’re getting impatient for good stuff, Lucy. It’s like they can’t get enough of it. Sometimes I don’t have anything good, and they get angry….But they like information, too, see? You have to keep them happy.”

  “So who are these men? What do they want the Sources for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what are they like? Describe them.”

  “I don’t know who they are.”

  I stepped away from him. “That’s useless, Harold. You’ve given me nothing. I’m going to Barnes now. Get off my arm.”

  He lurched forward with a cry, and caught at my sleeve. “You don’t understand. They’re not nice people, Luce! You don’t spend time staring at them. You transfer the stuff and leave. Everything’s done after dark. Listen, I can help you. I’m giving them a package tonight. You could be there. You could watch—see them, follow them maybe, I don’t know, as long as you keep me out of it. What do you think? I could do that for you. I could do that, Lucy, if you don’t…What? Why are you laughing?”

  “I know just what would happen. You’d hand me over to
them and run off.”

  “No! I swear! I hate them! They’re bad news, Lucy. I should never have gotten in with them. Only the money was so good. Listen, they’re dropping off a message this afternoon, telling me the place. It’s different each time. Always somewhere in Clerkenwell, but I never know where. I could meet you, once my shift ends. Here, or in the churchyard. I could tell you what’s been arranged. Then you could wait tonight, maybe hide someplace. It’ll be fine as long as they don’t find out you’re there.”

  Well, I could think of a thousand reasons why this was a bad idea, and all of them stemmed from Harold Mailer’s complete untrustworthiness. It seemed quite likely that he would prefer to see me dead than ruin his lucrative little trade, and letting him go would give him ample time to set up such an outcome. Having said that, I clearly wasn’t going to do much better here.

  He was watching my face, sidelong. “I’ll make it worth your while,” he said.

  “If anything happens to me tonight,” I said, after a long pause, “if you betray me in some way, I have friends who will hunt you down and make you pay. You’ll wish you’d thrown yourself into one of your furnaces instead of crossing me.” It was the best threat I could think of, but it sounded pretty weak, not to mention clichéd. Harold Mailer didn’t seem to care. He was nodding, white-faced, desperate to be gone.

  “Dusk, then,” he said, “at St. James’s churchyard. There’s a bench in the center, where the four paths meet. I’ll be there. I’ll have the information you need. But they can’t know about you, Lucy. They can’t. You’ve got to believe me. You don’t know what they’ll do. Promise you won’t ever tell them that I spoke to you.”

  “If you keep your word with me,” I said, “I’ll do the same. Otherwise…”

  “Oh, you agents always play fair, I know that.” He was clutching for his lunch bag, lying abandoned on the ground. “Everyone loves the agencies.” Then he was sidling away from me, his coat scuffing against the bricks, his face a queasy stew of duplicity, dislike, and fear. He got to the corner and rounded it like a rat, pressed close to the edge, gathering speed. “At dusk,” he said again, and was gone.

  Strange how close the darkness is, even when things seem brightest. Even in the glare of a summer noon, when the sidewalk bakes and iron fences are hot to the touch, the shadows are still with us. They congregate in doorways and porches, and under bridges, and beneath the brims of gentlemen’s hats so you cannot see their eyes. There is darkness in our mouths and ears; in our bags and wallets; within the swing of men’s jackets and beneath the flare of women’s skirts. We carry it around with us, the dark, and its influence stains us deep.

  That afternoon I sat in the window of a café on Clerkenwell Green, watching the faces in the crowds. Because of my profession, I didn’t get out much during the day, and my experience with ordinary people was mostly confined to the ghost-haunted and the dead. These folk passing me now—they represented everyone else, that terrified majority who kept their heads down, put their iron and silver in the windows, and tried to get on with their lives. The young, the old, busy enjoying the bright spring sunshine; they looked harmless enough to me.

  Yet somewhere out there, perhaps even among the people passing outside my window, were those attracted by the dark. It found expression in different ways. Some joined the ghost-cults that had proliferated across London, loudly welcoming the returning dead and trying to hear the messages they brought. Others sought out forbidden artifacts for their danger and rarity; there were stories of rich collectors who had dozens of Sources, stolen from graveyards and secreted in iron vaults underground. And there were those who used the Sources for strange occult rituals. At Lockwood & Co., we’d seen odd markings in the catacombs beneath the Aickmere Brothers department store: evidence of an abandoned circle, surrounded by heaps of haunted bones. George had theories, but the exact purpose of the circle—and who was responsible for it—remained in shadow.

  One way or another, despite DEPRAC’s best efforts, the black market for artifacts remained strong. And it seemed that, with the wretched Harold Mailer, I’d stumbled upon one of its main supply lines.

  What to do about it, though? Whoever Mailer’s contacts were, it was likely the trail would lead to the criminal Winkman family. Flo had seen the mummified head in their possession, after all. If I could gain proof of the connection between the Winkmans and the theft of Sources from the furnaces, I would make a decent name for myself.

  But that wasn’t my main priority. If it had been, I probably would just have nipped along to Scotland Yard, seen Inspector Barnes, and gotten him to do the work.

  No, what I wanted, most particularly, was to retrieve the whispering skull.

  You heard me right. I wanted the skull back. That wasn’t a statement I’d ever have expected to make.

  In many ways, the ghost in the jar had been a thorn in my side for ages. When I’d first encountered it, upon joining Lockwood’s company, I’d reacted with instant horror and distaste; and these feelings only intensified when it began to speak to me. It was thoroughly, defiantly, exultantly reprehensible; in fact, if you wrote down the ten most unsavory character traits you could imagine, the skull possessed the nine worst on the list, and it only lacked the tenth because that one wasn’t quite bad enough. The ghost’s name was unknown, and much of its past a mystery, though since what little we knew of its pre-death career involved grave-robbing, black magic, and cold-blooded murder, that wasn’t altogether a shame. No one else could hear it speak, so the skull had formed a special bond with me. Since it had the language of a longshoreman and the morals of a weasel, I’d had to cope with constant psychic sarcasm and abuse, and also learned plenty of new words.

  And yet, despite disliking it so much, I’d come to rely on that ghost.

  At the basic level, it did help me, fairly often, when I was out at work. Its insights, no matter how fleeting, had saved me many times. It had pinpointed Emma Marchment’s ghost, for instance, just a day or two before, and perhaps stopped me from blundering straight into her clutches. And last night it had dropped a hint—a pretty belated one, admittedly—about the location of the Source in the Ealing Cannibal affair. This was supernatural assistance that other operatives didn’t have.

  Which brought me to the wider point, the more profound reason why I hung around in Clerkenwell that day, hoping against hope that Harold Mailer wouldn’t betray me. The skull was a Type Three ghost, one that could communicate fully with the living, and that made it incredibly rare. And I was rare, too; I alone had the ability to hear it. With such a powerful artifact at my side, I was uniquely successful; the first person since Marissa Fittes to genuinely talk with ghosts. All my confidence, such as it was, stemmed from this simple fact. Without it? I was an ordinary agent once again—skilled, but unspectacular.

  Like it or not, the whispering skull helped define me. It was part of who I was. And now some grubby criminals were trying to take it from me.

  But I wasn’t going to lose it without a fight.

  The Winkmans and their operation were formidable; I knew that from experience. But if I trailed them tonight and found their storehouse, they would discover I was formidable, too.

  So I sat, drinking tea and dozing, while the sun went down beyond the houses. As dusk came, I put on my coat, tightened the straps of my rapier, and set off for St. James’s churchyard.

  Don’t think I hadn’t cased the place earlier, by the way. It had been the first thing I’d done after Mailer had scampered. I’d headed up toward the church, through the old iron gates, and into the square of open ground, where a few lunchtime picnickers lingered in the cool spring sunlight. It was almost entirely grass, that old yard, still undulating and irregular from where the graves had been removed in the great purge many years before, and it was surrounded on all sides by buildings. St. James’s neoclassical facade loomed to the north; elsewhere were the backs of houses, high churchyard walls, and locked iron gates. One entrance opened onto Sekforde Street, and
another onto Clerkenwell Green; these were connected by a simple concrete path. A second, smaller path ran from the church to a narrow alley in the south. Where the two paths crossed, roughly in the center of the churchyard, sat a single black wooden bench.

  I’d walked past that bench a number of times, deep in thought. It was a curious choice for a meeting place, being both extremely exposed and actually—when you considered the churchyard overall—quite shut in. I didn’t mind being out in the open, but I did dislike the ring of walls all around.

  What had Lockwood once told me about making sure that you always had a way out? Before engaging with any psychic phenomena, it’s vital to establish the terrain. Get a grip on the layout—particularly the exits and dead ends. Why? Because you’ve got to know how to vamoose if you lose control of the situation. I reckoned what applied to ghosts applied equally to crooked furnace workers.

  I’d completed several circuits of that churchyard, making calculations, measuring distances, checking and rechecking till I was happy. When I’d finally headed for the café, I could have drawn the whole site from memory. Now, four hours later, I was ready to put my mental map to good use.

  With the onset of dusk, the streets of Clerkenwell had emptied fast. The shops were closing, iron barriers were rattling down. Thanks to the sunny day, and the numerous ghost-lamps in the vicinity, a few pedestrians were still abroad, hastening to catch the final Tube trains. Some night-watch kids were already present. In St. James’s Church, wardens tolled the curfew bell.

  The churchyard was unlit. Lamps burned at three of its gates, with the black space between them suspended like a hammock. There were lit windows, too, high up in the buildings, which cast scattered squares of brightness across the lawns. I entered from the Sekforde Street gate, which was farthest from the central bench, and swiftly found a dark spot near the wall, where my eyes could adjust to the complex patterns of the half-light.

  Was he here?